Catholicism: In the Third Millennium
Thomas P. Rausch
Michael Glazier Books
This book is a new edition of Catholicism: At The Dawn Of The Third Millennium. It is a great book for one raised in the Catholic tradition or someone who is curious about it. It looks back over the past thirty-odd years at the goals of Vatican Council II, and how the church is doing at living up to the expectations from that event.
This revised edition does not, at first look, appear that different. Yet the few differences make it well worth it. There is major revision of chapter 2, section two, which has gone from being ‘The People of God’ to ‘God and God’s People’. There are also discussion questions at the end of each chapter. That will help the reader digest the material, or help a group study the book together.
All in all, in a new edition written seven years after the first, I was hoping for much more. There was an expectation of newer and fresher analysis of the material. Yet, even with that letdown, the book is worth an examination by a member of the catholic community or the casual scholar.
(First Published in Across the Creek 2006-02-10)
Some time’s your reading a book and the weight of the subject just burden’s you down. I just finished a book for school like that. It was a hard read, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation by Jonathan Kozol it details over a year’s worth of research into the lives of children in New York City, and specifically those of children living in poverty and disease in the ghetto. The situations described in this book will grip your heart and be profoundly disturbing. Elie Wiesel states about this book “Jonathan’s struggle is noble, his appeal urgent. What he says must be heard. His outcry must shake our nation out of its guilty indifference.” If you want the truth about the poor in America read this book.
On the other hand I am reading two book’s this week that are challenging and uplifting and stir the heart to look to greater heights. They are A Holy Meal: The Lord’s Supper in the Life of the Church by Gordon T. Smith and Amazing Church: A Catholic Theologian Remembers a Half-Century of Change by Gregory Baum. Today at the library I went back and forth reading a chapter in one and then the other.
The first one; A Holy Meal looks at the importance and significance of the lord’s supper or communion in the church and in God’s interactions with man. From Adam and Eve eating with God in the garden of Eden, to the meal’s Jesus ate with his followers after the resurrection. Though I have yet to finish it, it is one of the best spiritual book’s I have read this year.
Baum’s book on the other hand is energetic, fast paced and engaging. Spanning the history of the church from the mid 1800’s till today it examines the Catholic Church’s positions and the shift in focus over the time Baum has been a theologian. As a former professor at St. Michael’s College and now at McGill University Baum is one of the voices at the forefront of Canadian Catholic thought. This book is a retrospective of what he sees that the church is doing well.
Well those are just 3 of the books in the pile on the desk this week. Yet each would be worth taking a look at. Happy reading!
No matter how hard I have tried, I find that I am very Catholic in my core. It’s like Robertson Davies book What’s Bread in the Bone will out in the flesh. I was raised Catholic and have through the years spend differing amounts of time away from the church. Yet I always return. I am by no way saying the Catholic church has all the answers, but there is something in it’s traditions and diversity that always draw me home.
I find the same in my readings, I return to certain authors again and again. Both in my fiction reading and in my spiritual readings; for fiction I return to Thomas Hardy, Robertson Davies, Robert A. Heinlein and Madeleine L’Engle. For Catholic authors I return again and again to Henri Nouwen, Thomas Merton, Scott Hahn, Michael W. Higgins and Andrew M. Greeley. And for Christian authors I am drawn to C.S. Lewis, John Eldredge, Dallas Willard and many others.
Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and PlaceTerry Tempest WilliamsVintage Books This book is so powerful and so moving, it brought me to tears in more than one place. This is an amazing story of place, family, love, and the desert. Last winter I had to read one of Williams’ books for a course and have become addicted to her writings. Williams is a Mormon naturalist who pushes the boundaries of both, and her unique insights bring a freshness to both faith and preservation. I have tracked down and read all of her books that are currently in print, and this is the most powerful of them. Terry states in another book, “The great silences of the desert are not void of sound, but void of distractions.” This book is about the silences and the distractions of death, the death of her mother and of the bird refuge that she loved and that was her solace. The chapter headings are unique, written as a journal, but not by date but by lake height. As the Great Salt Lake rose to record heights in the mid-1980’s, Terry’s mother was dying of cancer, and the Salt Lake’s rising was flooding the Bear River Migratory Bird refuge. The refuge was sacred to Terry as a place she and her grandmother would visit together, and as a place to get alone outside of the city to reflect, meditate and believe.
Terry begins the prologue with “Everything about the Great Salt Lake is exaggerated – the heart, the cold, the salt, and the brine. It is a landscape so surreal one can never know what it is for certain. … Most of the women in my family are dead. Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family.” pg.3. This book chronicles one woman’s love of the desert, of the bird refuge and of her family. It tells the story of cancer clusters in the desert where the US Government tested thousands of nuclear devices from the 1940’s to the 60’s.
Journey with one woman, through disease, death, destruction and the desert; journey with her both through the physical landscape and the internal one, to a new place- a place of determination and desire to make change and to grow from all she has been through.
Terry states in the epilogue, “I belong to a clan of One-Breasted Women. My mother, my grandmothers, and six aunts have all had mastectomies. Seven are dead. The two who survive have just completed rounds of chemotherapy and radiation.” pg. 281. This is a story of a strong woman who shares her pain, and her strength, to help us all see what could be possible with the triumph of the human spirit.
(First Published in Imprint 2005-11-18 as 'A tale of true inner strenght')
Bench Press
Sven Lindqvist
Translated Sarah Death
Granta Publications
What do an aging 50-year-old writer and a skinhead body builder have in common? This is an intriguing little book, written part as memoir and part as history of working out, weights and bodybuilding, and little bit of dreams. Sven, who is our 50- year-old writer, meets the skinhead in the sauna; they end up talking, as people will at the gym, and a man who only swam laps started working out. Yet in the process of working out, he experiences an almost religious epiphany.
A man, who was happy as a writer traveling the world, and was content with middle age, slowly reawakens dreams from his youth. As he workouts, Sven remembers childhood dreams, like a desire to visit the Sahara desert.
This book begins with a quote from Marcus Aurelius; “Does transformation frighten you? Yet what can happen without transformation? Can you yourself take a hot bath without the wood being transformed, can you nourish yourself without the food being transformed? Do you not then see that your own transformation is equally necessary?”, and this book will change you. As I read it, my own childhood dreams and aspirations, long put away, were awakened. This book is broken up into 85 penses or thoughts. Some are the personal reflections of the author, some of history, and tidbits of information fun and bizarre, and a few are visions that Sven has along his journey.
This book is the first in a trilogy. The last chapters of the first two are the first chapter of the next. They are Desert Divers , a journey into the desert to see childhood dreams, and Exterminate All the Brutes, a history of genocides in Africa committed by Europeans and leading up to the great genocide of the Nazi reign. Sven, in the preface to Bench Press, states: “As a boy, I read about fire-eaters and well-divers, sandstorms and desert lakes. I dreamed of going to the Sahara. Bench Press is the story of how I found my dream again....…these books grew out of one another and form a single unit, taking the reader from the self-obsessed physical culture of the early 1980’s to a new awareness of the crimes of the past and the threats lying ahead in the future.”
Lindqvist books in English are not easy to find, but are well worth the effort. Back to the writer and the skinhead, what they have in common is self-image and self- doubt that can be overcome, and dreams that are assisted by building the body. Or as Montaigne stated a long time ago: “To Strengthen the mind you must harden the muscles.” Use this book for the mind and maybe it will challenge you to do some work on tuning up the body as well.
(First Published in Imprint 2005-11-18 as 'Memoirs, brains and brawn')
(Reprinted in Across the Creek the St. Jerome's Students' Union newspaper column 'Book Look' November 2005)
Other Fitness Articles:
Fall 2011 Programs
Workout program March 2012
My Gear February 2012
Fitness My Retrospective
TRX Articles:
TRX an Introduction
TRX Force
TRX Force Tactical
TRX Essential Flexibility
My P90X Series:
Phase I, Phase II, Gear, Phase III, Fitness Options, P90X at 120 Days Out
Health & Fitness Book Reviews:
The Primal Blueprint 21 Day Total Body Transformation - Mark Sisson
The Ten Commandments Of Lifting Weights - Jared Zimmerer
Toadally Primal Smoothies - Todd Dosenberry
Caveman Resurection - Jeff Pickett
40 Days to Optimal Health - Dr. Scott Morris
Eat Stop Eat - Brad Pilon
The Primal Blueprint - Mark Sisson
The New Rules of Lifting - Lou Schuler and Alwyn Cosgrove
Bench Press by: Sven Lindqvist
Sly Moves by: Sylvester Stallone
Fit for Eternal Life: A Christian Approach to Working Out, Eating Right, and Building the Virtues of Fitness in Your Soul by: Dr. Kevin Vost
Body for Life 12 Weeks to Mental and Physical Strenght by: Bill Phillips
Lose Fat Not Faith by Jeremy R. Likeness
Living The Good Life: Your Guide to Health and Success by: David Patchell-Evans
Dump your Trainer by: Ashley Marriott and Marc L. Paulsen
I love reading there is no doubt about it. I am known for my love and reading and my passion for books. I find I come upon an author or a subject and hunger and thirst for it more and more. I tend to read all that I can from authors that I like. In some ways it’s like music lover who collects a complete discography of an artist or group. Over the last few years I have read a little broader than in the past. I have gone through phases or reading Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland, Terry Tempest Williams, Travel Literature, environmental preservation and spiritual environmental writings. Now I find that I am returning to things Catholic. Having been raised Irish Catholic I find I return to catholic writings every few years and renew my spirit and my hunger for the things of God.
I love bookstores, and used bookstores! I was in Toronto this past weekend staying at Sanctuary a Church that ministers in the inner city. I was there with Jeremy Horne, my former boss from The Navigators who is now leading a new organization called Life Change Adventures. A few years ago I was at a retreat there and one of the speakers introduced me to Noah benShea one of my favorite authors. While there that time I found his books at used book stores near by. This time around I found a great little book called “Confessions of St. Patrick” it was a book I lend out a few years back and was never returned. I found it used for $2.75 which is great because it is out of print and I have wanted to reread it for a while.
