Thinking about a couple of books I've found during my move

Seizing the Apple: A Feminist Spirituality of Personal Growth ~ by Denise Lardner Carmody, 1984, feminism, viii + 184 pages

By creatively employing the insights of feminist psychologists, novelists, and what she calls the new transcendentalist school of Lonergan, Voegelin, and Rahner, the author (1935-2023) offers us a distinctly feminist spirituality — one that's characterized by self-transcendence or personal growth.  The model she uses is that of a helix or upward spiral, and the goal is to establish harmony between the demands of freedom on the one side — the freedom to push ahead, stretch one's horizons, seize the apple — and the call to loving holism, caring, making connections on the other side.  Moving from theory to practice in the last part of the book, the author applies her model to four zones of personal life:  prayer, work, family life, and politics.

Word of the Day #1

ho·lism / noun = the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts.  Holism is often applied to mental states, language, and ecology.  Example:  "Carmody's goal was to establish harmony between the demands of freedom (on one side) and loving holism, caring, and making connections (on the other side)."

Working but Poor: America's Contradiction ~ by Sar A. Levitan and Isaac Shapiro, 1987, political science / economics, ix + 142 pages

The American ethos equates work with material progress, but nine million Americans labor in poverty.  Two million of them work at year-round, full-time jobs.  "In a nation as affluent as the United States," the authors say, "the persistence of the working poor challenges the fairness of the rules governing the distribution of economic rewards."

I unearthed a stack of books I got in the 1980s; I have never read either of these.  I bought the upper one like new and paid only $2.00 for it on sale in 1986.  The original Cokesbury price was $10.95, but today this paperback would cost me $17.61 online.

The lower one was brand new and still in shrink wrap, but a half-torn-off price sticker was taped to the front.  That may means I bought it on sale, but maybe not.  Since I never opened it, it's still a "new" book decades later!

Word of the Day #2

shrink-wrap / verb = package (an article) by enclosing it in clinging transparent plastic film that shrinks tightly on to it.  Example:  "The Johns Hopkins University Press carefully shrink-wrapped this book."