The Idea of the Holy

Can I still post books even if I had to read them for class? I'm going to assume that I can, cuz lets be honest, with all the reading that I have to do for my classes this semester I'm not going to have a ton of free time for free reading. Jasper has us reading a book a week, good gravy!

Anyway, I just finished "The Idea of the Holy" by Rudolf Otto. This is thick stuff kids, German theology at its best. Lots of big words and multiple explinations for most of the stuff.

He spends alot of his time talking about the "numinous" experience. He describes the "numinous" as those moments in our lives where we have radical confrontations with the holy. He is writing from the perspective of being lutheran minister, but he writes less to describe and put words to the Christian experience and instead speaks to the "numinous". He says the numinous experience has three components: the mysterium, the tremendum, and the facinions. That as people we have encounters with that which is Holy, and those encounters are beyond rationality, have more aweful power than we can ever understand, and they are addictive, we crave them.

At one point he says to stop and think about a time you have had an encounter with the numinous, or the holy. He says that to talk about that which is Holy and set apart we must beable to discern that experience from adolesent lust, rational fear and a whole host of other emotions. He says that if you cannot conjure up those moments that you have encountered something so much greater than yourself that you actually shudder, then to put the book down and walk away, because the numinous is so beyond rationality that we can describe around it, but if you have no experience of it, reading about it is a waste of your time.

Essentially its a guy, just trying to explain the one thing that he admits is utterly unexplainable. Never the less he presents some interesting ideas on how terribly wonderful the encounter with the spirt is.

A Dog's Life

I've been munching my way through the Peter Mayle section of my woefully inadequate local library and found this little gem this past week. For those of you who also love dogs it is quite a treat. Written from the perspective of one of Mayle's dogs, Boy, there are some astute observations of human nature that had me rolling with laughter. In one passage where Boy is describing the steps of how to make up with one's "management" after doing something wrong, the resemblance of the actions he recommends to the actions of the late great Millie are absolutely uncanny. This week i've been looking at my dog and puppies a little bit differently.

Amazing Grace

I'm currently re-reading Amazing Grace: a vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris. I was given this book to read 3 summers ago when i was in Guatemala, and i remember reading it on a mini-vacation on this black sand beach. it was so what i needed at that point, and i devoured the book. you know when the whole experience of reading a book is so great? i recall that whole 2 days with fondness. So i bought the book recently, and have begun reading it a second time, though this time a little more slowly. The book is in a format similar to Norris' other books, semi-short entries. This makes for great daily readings. pretty fool-proof. although sometimes i admit i just cant stop myself from reading several entries at a time. i know, life on the edge....

i find my self really drawn to both norris' writing style and substance. she is a poet writing prose, and it shows. she uses some really great images. im also really intrigued by her story. she was a writer living in new york, basically didnt give two figs about religion. suddenly, she decided to move back to south dakota and began attending pretty much the only church in town, the presbyterian church. she also became a benedictine lay oblate, which means she is about as close as you can get to being a benedictine without actually being a monk or nun. to me, norris does a great job of blending catholic and protestant traditions and doctrines into one spirit.

here, she basically breaks down terms of faith-some more obscure than others. some are narratives, some are more theological. but they are all good.

other things to read by her:

The cloister walk
Dakota
Quotidian Mysteries

shes good. real good.

peace out, lex

Evangelical Sub-Culture

I read Randall Balmer's Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory this book about a month ago and, quite literally, couldn't put it down. There is something about being a part of this sub-culture, if even on the margins, that makes it that much more fascinating to study. What I appreciated about Balmer's ethnographic study was it's lack of distance, lack of impersonality. Balmer was born and raised into a conservative Evangelical home where he was thoroughly emmersed in all things Evangelical. His faith journey has lead him away from traditional Evangelicalism to more traditional, liturgical communities - Episcopalian I do believe. But, upon writing this book, Balmer realized that he will always be an Evangelical at heart, always strangely familiar with the norms and mores that go along with this American folk religion. My friend Tim was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, and though he has since converted to Catholocism, Tim says that he "will always be a fundamentalist." It's in his DNA. Similarly, no matter which circle of Christian influence I choose to associate myself with, I will always have a familiarity with Evangelicalism that others raised Catholic or mainline or Orthodox will not. It is in my blood.

I really recommend this book because it provides us, churched and non-churched, pious or pagan, with a perspective of the Evangelical wing of Christianity that is far more diverse than we could ever have imagined. From pofiteering tele-evangelists to street performers to house churches, Evangelicalism has manifested itself in a multitude of ways in our society. Balmer conintually refers to it as the "American folk religion." Balmer's writing is witty and sympathetic, and he involves himself in the text like any proper post-modern-era writer should. There is no division between subject and observer in this text. Balmer is not ashamed to share his insight, his agreements and woes, with the people he meets and things he witnesses.
-HEATHER