Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Library Loot ~ October 17-23

The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life ~ by Paula Huston, 2003 (NG 248.582 Hus)
Is leading a simple life possible in a world of chaos and complexity?  Huston, a busy forty-something college professor, wife, and mother, embarked on a spiritual journey to find a peaceful, less cluttered kind of life.
Gaining a New Attitude on Life: Four Interactive Bible Studies for Individuals or Small Groups ~ by Max Lucado, 2007 (NG 248.4 Luc)
Using a CD as well as a workbook, Lucado shows how a new attitude changes how we see and experience life.  The four studies cover how to get out of a slump, overcoming a bad attitude, dealing with disappointment, and overcoming a bad attitude about life.
The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition ~ by Huston Smith, 2005 (NG 230 Smi)
Smith cuts through the wide variety of contemporary interpretations of Christianity to describe Christianity's "Great Tradition," the common faith of the first millennium of believers, which is the trunk of the tree from which Christianity's many branches have grown.  This is not the exclusivist Christianity of strict fundamentalists, nor the liberal, watered-down Christianity practiced by many contemporary churchgoers.  In exposing biblical literalism as unworkable as well as enumerating the mistakes of modern secularists, Smith presents the very soul of a real and substantive faith, one still relevant and worth believing in.
Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life ~ by Kathleen Norris, 2008, memoir (NG 248.86)
Norris’s memoir resurrects the ancient term acedia, or soul-weariness, and explores its relevancy to the modern individual and culture.  She had written several much loved books, yet struggled to summon the energy for daily tasks.  Having endured times of deep soul-weariness since she was a teenager, she recognized that this passage described her affliction:  sinking into a state of being unable to care.  Norris restores understanding of this “noonday demon,” so familiar to those in the early and medieval Church, to the modern world’s vernacular.
Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire @ The Captive Reader and Marg @ The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share titles of books they’ve checked out of the library.  To participate, just add your post to their Mister Linky any time during the week.  And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries this week.

1 comment:

Helen's Book Blog said...

Living a less cluttered life sounds REALLY good right about now. Somehow I have no time to read, to just sit, or to do the little things that will make life simpler (like hook up the new printer that has been sitting on my bedroom floor for 10 days!)