15 books ~ plus one

Facebook had a meme going around, in July 2009, encouraging folks to "name 15 books that will always stick with you."  I was curious about which books were most meaningful to me.  Here are my 15 books, in alphabetical order.  Plus one.  The bad part of making a list like this is later remembering a book that would definitely have made the list if only I'd remembered it in time.  In my case, that book was Herland (#16).

#1 ~ Agape Love: A Tradition Found in Eight World Religions ~ by John Templeton, 1999, religion, 10/10
#2 ~ The Gnostic Gospels ~ by Elaine Pagels, 1979, religion, 10/10
#3 ~ The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions ~ by Karen Armstrong, 2006, religion, 10/10
#4 ~ The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith ~ by Marcus J. Borg, 2003, religion, 10/10
#5 ~ Honest to God ~ by John A. T. Robinson, 1963, religion, 10/10

#6 ~ Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 ~ by Simon Winchester, 2003, history, 10/10
#7 ~ Miss Rumphius ~ by Barbara Cooney, 1982, children's, 10/10
#8 ~ The Mists of Avalon ~ by Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1982, fantasy, 10/10
#9 ~ The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity ~ by Hyam Maccoby, 1986, religion, 8/10
#10 ~ The Secret Life of Bees ~ by Sue Monk Kidd, 2002, fiction, 10/10
#11 ~ The Social Construction of Reality ~ by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, 1966, philosophy, 10/10
#12 ~ Time and Again ~ by Jack Finney, 1970, speculative fiction (New York), 10/10
#13 ~ Train to Pakistan ~ by Khushwant Singh, 1956, fiction (India), 10/10
#14 ~ Worlds in Collision ~ by Immanuel Velikovsky, 1950, planetary theory, 9/10
#15 ~ A Wrinkle in Time ~ by Madeleine L'Engle, 1962, YA fiction, 10/10
#16 ~ Herland ~ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915, women's studies, 10/10

Herland ~ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915) is one I re-read about once a decade for quite a few years.

This utopian novel describes an isolated society composed entirely of women who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction).  The result is an ideal social order, free of war, conflict, and domination.

Time and Again ~ by Jack Finney (1970) is my favorite time travel story.

"Sleep. And when you awake everything you know of the twentieth century will be gone from your mind.  Tonight is January 21, 1882.  There are no such things as automobiles, no planes, computers, television.  'Nuclear' appears in no dictionary.  You have never heard the name Richard Nixon."  Did illustrator Si Morley really step out of his twentieth-century apartment one night — right into the winter of 1882?  The U.S. Government believed it, especially when Si returned with a portfolio of brand-new sketches and tintype photos of a world that no longer existed — or did it?

Train to Pakistan ~ by Khushwant Singh (1956) is an historical novel I assigned students in my Religions of the World classes to read.

This book of fiction follows the fate of Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu inhabitants of one village during the violent 1947 partition of the Punjab region between India and Pakistan.  What could happen when people are forced to relocate because of their religion?

Books I — literally — couldn't give away

Dear Mr. Henshaw ~ by Beverly Cleary, 1983, YA novel

Summary:  "Leigh Botts has been author Boyd Henshaw's number one fan ever since he was in second grade. Now in sixth grade, Leigh lives with his mother and is the new kid at school. He's lonely, troubled by the absence of his father, a cross-country trucker, and angry because a mysterious thief steals from his lunchbag. Then Leigh's teacher assigns a letter-writing project. Naturally Leigh chooses to write to Mr. Henshaw, whose surprising answer changes Leigh's life."

The People: No Different Flesh ~ by Zenna Henderson, 1967, fantasy

Summary:  "A race from another planet become marooned on earth. The People have the very best of human qualities: love, gentleness, spirituality; and also special powers of healing, levitation and other abilities.  One stormy night, Mark and Meris find a young girl, who has fallen in a capsule from the sky and has special abilities. The couple are still grieving the loss of their own baby and must come to terms with the emotional issues that caring for the young girl creates in both of them."

Forgiveness Is a Work as Well as a Grace ~ by Edna Hong, 1984, religion

One sentence from the book jumped out at me, as I flipped through it just now:  "I might have succeeded in forgetting the event if it had not so obstinately persisted in remembering me" (p. 77).  That's the problem with the saying "forgive and forget," isn't it?  I decided to read this book.

The Faded Flower ~ by Paul McCusker, 2001, fiction

Funny, the difference a few hours can make. At 4:30 p.m., Frank Reynolds still has a sense of accomplishment and control. By five o'clock, he's lost his job of twenty-two years. By six o'clock, he's learned of his father's Alzheimer's disease. An hour-and-a-half is all it has taken to turn Frank's world upside down, thrusting him and his family onto a path none of them could ever have expected.  The one certain thing now is change.

Mother Nature's Greatest Hits: The Top 40 Wonders of the Animal World ~ by Bartleby Nash, 1991, nature/humor

From the Foreword:  "The animal kingdom provides an endless source of amusement and fascination for the casual observer ... The more we study the astounding range and diversity of animal life and behavior on this planet, the more wondrous nd unfathomable Mother Nature's creation appears.  Yet every day, whole species disappear forever from the face of the earth.  And when they vanish into extinction, their unique contribution to the grand experiment of life on this planet vanishes with them."

Myths of the Greeks and Romans ~ by Michael Grant, 1962, history (Meditarranean world)

Grant demonstrates the dynamic effect that ancient mythology has had on the creative efforts of succeding centuries. He summarizes all the myths as well as the legends of the lesser gods and heroes, and traces their origins in historical fact or religious myth. He then shows how myths have continued to evolve throughout the ages. The author's brilliant investigations lead from Pericles to Picasso, Homer to Freud, Apuleius to Grimm - and prove that mythological themes have been continuously restated in art, science, and folklore, up to the present day.

Another resident of my gated senior community came into the computer room while I was working on this post.  She got excited about this book about myths and, when I told her it was one of the books I couldn't even give away, she offered to buy it.  I told her it was hers.  It had, after all, been left outside after my yard sale along with a "free books" sign.

Which leads me to the subject line of this post.  When I took part yesterday in the neighborhood yard sale, I sold only 43 books.  Rather than pack up several boxes of books that were left, I changed my YARD SALE sign to FREE BOOKS.

A man who had bought books earlier came back by my house, saw the sign, and stopped again, leaving with another box full of books.  I left the rest of the books outside another couple of hours, and when I came back, there were still books unclaimed, including these six that I decided to read (well, except for the book on myths I gave away while typing this to post Sunday morning).  I'll donate the rest to the "library" where I live — which consists of three bookshelves where readers living here leave books for anyone else who wants to read them.

P.S.  Night by Elie Wiesel, who won the 1986 Novel Peace Prize, was also left. It's about the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944-1945. The central event in it, for me and many others, is when a boy dies slowly on the gallows (pp. 61-62):

Behind me, I heard the same man asking: Where is God now?
And I heard a voice within me answer him: ... Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows.

Fifteen books ~ #11 ~ The Social Construction of Reality

The Social Construction of Reality ~ by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966) is #11 in my series on "fifteen books that will always stick with me." I read this decades ago, so I don't remember details. What I do remember is the flash of insight that came from realizing we construct reality. People of a particular culture decide what's real and what isn't, and thus we "see" what society has decided we shall see.

"...the primary knowledge about the institutional order ... is the sum total of ‘what everybody knows’ about a social world, an assemblage of maxims, morals, proverbial nuggets of wisdom, values and beliefs, myths, and so forth” (p.65).

Let me give you an example of how I undersand what the authors mean. I grew up in a time and place where "everyone knew" -- meaning the grown-ups around me "knew" -- there's no such thing as a ghost. Therefore, if a child is frightened by a "ghost in the closet," her parents assure her nothing is there. The little girl may not be convinced right then, but by the time she is an adult she too will "know" there are no ghosts.

I grew up long before the movie "Sixth Sense" was popular in 1999. As a matter of fact, I was a 59-year-old grandmother by the time that movie child confided in his psychologist that he "sees dead people that walk around like regular people." One day recently I was captured by this phrase in a synopsis of Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos (1999): "as a girl, she saw a dying soul leave its body." I had never expressed it quite that way, but I have described many times what I saw when my grandfather died. I was four years old and can still visualize the scene. The adults were all around his hospital bed, looking down at him. I wondered why they weren't looking up, since he was floating over them toward the far wall on my right, headed toward the intersection of wall and ceiling. And then he was gone. On the day I read that synopsis I decided to google an illustration for "soul leaving a body." This is what I found.



The one on the left is close, but the one on the right is more accurate.



This drawing has the right idea, except it's way too stiff. Though my grandfather's form was wispy like steam, the motion was very fluid and natural. And he went head first off to the right, kind of like the one on the right. However, the rising soul/spirit didn't exactly look like his body. It looked more like steam rising from hot coffee, though identifiable as the person himself. I could tell it was my grandfather and wondered why the grown-ups weren't looking where he was going, toward the wall and ceiling over to my right, as in these pictures.

The Social Construction of Reality confirmed something I knew deep inside, probably since the age of four. For allowing me to trust my reality, I rate this book 10 of 10.

Fifteen books ~ #10 ~ The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (2002) is #10 alphabetically in my continuing series on "fifteen books that will always stick with me."

What is it about this book that I like so much? Maybe it's the image of Rosaleen, a black woman in the South in 1964, spitting snuff on the shoes of a racist white man who is harrassing her. Maybe it's the strong character of August Boatwright (one of the "calendar sisters" of May, June, and August), who epitomizes a queen bee in this story about bee-keeping sisters who take in a 14-year-old white girl running away from her abusive daddy -- I think making her kneel on grits is abuse, don't you? Maybe it's the Black Madonna in Tiburon, South Carolina, that Lily runs to after she breaks Rosaleen out of custody. Maybe it's that this first novel was written after the author realized conventional goodness just wasn't enough.

In The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman's Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine (1996), Sue Monk Kidd says her awakening began on the day she overheard two men talking about her daughter Ann, down on her knees stocking a drugstore shelf. One man said, "Now that's how I like to see a woman -- on her knees." The men laughed, Ann looked stricken, and Kidd herself was enraged, telling them, "You may like to see her and other women on their knees, but we don't belong there. We don't belong there!" That episode began a period of intense searching that, in my opinion, deepened her writing. Look at the beautiful way she uses words:

"There had been a moment, many moments really, when truth seized me and I 'conceived' myself as woman. Or maybe I reconceived myself. At any rate, it had been extraordinary and surprising to find myself -- a conventionally religious woman in my late thirties -- suddenly struck pregnant with a new consciousness, with an unfolding new awareness of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be spiritual as a woman" (p. 7).

Don't you love that phrase "struck pregnant"? I do. By the way, she and Ann have a new book out, published this month, called Traveling with Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Memoir.

Click this link for an interview with the author and discussion questions about The Secret Life of Bees for your book club. To read even more, click here.

I'm going to rate both of these books:

(1) The Secret Life of Bees was a book I couldn't put down, so it rates 10 of 10.

(2) And because it's such an excellent book, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter rates 9 out of 10.  NOTE:  I also wrote about this book here, where I gave it a rating of 10/10.

Fifteen books ~ #9 ~ The Mythmaker

Continuing my series on "fifteen books that will always stick with me," #9 in alphabetical order is

The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity ~ by Hyam Maccoby, 1986.

I read this book a decade or so ago, and it made me take another look at Paul. Writings attributed to Paul and about Paul take up about half of the New Testament, the Christian Bible, but I was one of those who had pretty much given up trying to defend Paul. Even after reading What Paul Really Said about Women by John Temple Bristow, which exonerated Paul by examining the biblical text more closely. There seemed to be too many problems with Paul. When I ran across The Mythmaker, I had to re-examine my thinking.

Who was the founder of Christianity? Most would say Jesus, of course, but Maccoby says Jesus was no more the founder of Christianity than the historical Hamlet was the author of Hamlet. Even though Paul never met Jesus face to face, Maccoby says he "invented" Christianity, adding elements of Judaism, Gnosticism, and pagan mystery cults to the story of Jesus's crucifixion.

"...the dominant outlook and shaping perspective of the Gospels is that of Paul, for the simple reason that it was the Paulinist view of what Jesus' sojourn on Earth had been about that was triumphant in the Church as it developed in history. Rival interpretations, which at one time had been orthodox, opposed to Paul's very individual views, now became heretical and were crowded out of the final version of the writings adopted by the Pauline Church as the inspired canon of the New Testament" (p. 4).

This short summary doesn't do the book justice, but here's my point: I was fascinated by the ideas in this book and have continued to read about Paul because of it. This week I read The First Paul by Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, which I will review next. The scholarship in The Mythmaker may be dated (as Crossan said when I asked him today at a lecture in Chattanooga), but it piqued my interest in reading the scholarly works of people like Borg and Crossan, who is also co-author of In Search of Paul: How Jesus's Apostle Opposed Rome's Empire with God's Kingdom.

For the interest in Paul that it generated in my thinking, I give The Mythmaker a rating of 8 out of 10.

Fifteen books ~ #8 ~ The Mists of Avalon

Continuing my series on "fifteen books that will always stick with me," #8 in alphabetical order is ...

The Mists of Avalon ~ by Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1982

When I think of Avalon, I think of a boat gliding toward a mist-shrouded isle.  It's also a place lost in the mists of time, at least since Christianity took over Britain.

In Bradley's version of the story, which gives us the legend of King Arthur from the viewpoint of the women around him, I could see the goddess religion being supplanted.  To do this, the author shows the holy place of each in exactly the same place.   That makes for a bit of surrealism, as someone who is on misty Avalon will occasionally hear the Christians who are all around them at the same time — or would that be, at a later time?  Jana L. Perskie, one of Amazon.com's Top 100 reviewers, said:

The tale is told from the points of view of the much maligned Morgaine (Morgana Le Fey), Priestess of Avalon, and Gwenhwyfar (Gwynivere), Christian princess and future queen of Camelot. ... Believers of each religion seek to control the throne, but ultimately Christianity ascends to be the organized religion of the land.  Since Morgaine is a Druid High Priestess, it would explain why she received such a bad rap in Christian civilization.

I came away from the book much more sympathetic to Morgaine, also known as Morgana le Fey, which means "of the faeries."   Women such as Arthur's mother, sister, and wife didn't think like the knights of the round table, but had different concerns.



Three friends and I are studying Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth, and this week's chapter happened to be "The Gift of the Goddess."   One of the women has an unglazed copy of a tiny goddess figurine similar to the "Goddess of Willendorf" on the left, and I have a figure like the goddess-crone with the thumb-shaped depression on the right.  Both represent the fertility of Mother Earth.  The earth feeds and sustains us as a mother does her child.  There are no fertility figurines in The Mists of Avalon, but we do see one way of being religious pushed aside by another, just as goddess figurines were destroyed by devotees of the new religion.  I think it's interesting that these little figures are now turning up all over the world.

The Mists of Avalon ~ by Marion Zimmer Bradley is a great fantasy, and I rate it 10 of 10.

Fifteen books ~ #7 ~ Miss Rumphius

In my series on "fifteen books that will always stick with me," Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney is the seventh, alphabetically speaking.

I love this book. I told you two-and-a-half years ago it's my favorite children's book. I wish I could show you every picture in the book. It's the story of a girl whose grandfather had told her to do something in her life to make the world more beautiful. Little Alice grew up, traveled, and settled by the sea, and what she did to make the world more beautiful was to plant lupines all over the place. To see more of the pages, see a beautiful miss rumphius.

This book is a favorite of teachers. When I was new to blogging, I found a blog called The Miss Rumphius Effect and knew Tricia was my kind of person. Some teachers use the book to help children learn how to Be a Good Citizen with Miss Rumphius. And here's another web page about using Miss Rumphius.

A school principal chose this book to illustrate respect for the environment. And a home- schooling mother wrote about Miss Rumphius and Me on her blog, teaching me that lupines don't flower until the second year. This photo is what her first year's growth looked like.

Miss Rumphius ~ by Barbara Cooney, 1982, won the American Book Sellers National Book Award. It's an excellent book that I couldn't simply read and put down -- I stared at the pictures and drifted off into imagination. I think I could do a doctoral dissertation on this book! I rate Miss Rumphius 10 of 10.


Isn't this beautiful? Miss Rumphius must have been here! So what could YOU do to make the world more beautiful?

Fifteen books ~ #6 ~ Krakatoa

Continuing my series on "fifteen books that will always stick with me," my #6 in alphabetical order is Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester.

This book was published in 2003, a hundred and twenty years after the massive volcanic explosion of the island of Krakatoa. At the time I was managing a bookstore in Trenton, Georgia, and shouldn't have been surprised that few, if any, of my customers were interested in that long-ago event. Perhaps a better question would have been to ask myself why I was so taken by it. I think I know why.

Many years ago I read something about Krakatoa, a volcanic island in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. When the volcano erupted in 1883, two-thirds of the island disappeared. The explosion, the resulting tsunami, and fumes and ashes killed over 40,000 people. But the image that stayed with me was of darkened skies all around the world, making everything red.

Yesterday I reviewed a book and mentioned my father's father; this book brings to mind my mother's mother. I don't have a digitized photo of her (like the one of him), but I do know that she was slightly under five feet tall and -- more importantly for this tale -- was born in December 1880. Notice the date when Krakatoa blew up. Little Inez Geneva Underwood, who would one day be my grandmother, was two-and-a-half years old. She was THERE, in that world, when Krakatoa exploded. When the book came out, I wanted to read about that world-shattering event.




It's easy to see that the two drawings were made from the black-and-white photograph above them, which was taken at the beginning of the eruptions of Krakatoa.

When I learned about this book, I wanted to read it immediately. The maps were helpful, especially since the author gives not only details about the seismic events of that day, but also what happened to people on ships and on land all around the Javanese island that vanished in a volcanic eruption of almost unimaginable force, heard as far away as Australia.

I probably got more from reading this book because I discussed it with my friend Margreet as we read. And maybe because I kept thinking that someone I can remember (even though Inez died when I was three) was alive during the greatest volcanic explosion of modern times. Rated: 10 of 10, couldn't put it down.
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I wrote about Krakatoa again after the eruption of the volcano in Iceland whose ash wreaked havoc with air travel in April 2010.  Click here to read that post.

Fifteen books ~ #5 ~ Honest to God

Continuing my series on "fifteen books that will always stick with me," #5 in alphabetical order is Honest to God by John A. T. Robinson, 1963.

I read this book nearly four decades ago, and its freshness and honesty was like opening a window and being able to take a deep breath. It showed me a new way of thinking about God and religion. It falls between the books Your God Is Too Small by J. B. Phillips and The Heart of Christianity by Marcus J. Borg.

Phillips came up with a list of inadequate god-concepts we hold, such as Resident Policeman, Parental Hangover, Grand Old Man, Meek-and-Mild, Managing Director, and Pale Galilean.

Borg points out two ways of being Christian: an earlier paradigm concerned with right beliefs and an emerging paradigm which focuses more on transformation.

Robinson, who was Bishop of Woolwich (England) when this book was published in 1963, was as dismayed as I am about the vehemence (which shows the insecurity) of those who feel they must defend God and their faith against anyone who disagrees with them. God doesn't need to be defended, but I very much needed a way to evaluate things I'd been told all my life were not only important, but required of me. This was one of the early signposts that helped me sort the worthwhile ideas from the hollow words, the clearly life-affirming wheat from the worthless chaff.  I highly recommend this book.

Rated: 10 of 10, couldn't put it down.

Fifteen books ~ #4 ~ The Heart of Christianity

I heard Marcus Borg in 2006, when he spoke at First-Centenary United Methodist Church about his book The Heart of Christianity, which is the fourth in my series of "fifteen books that will always stick with me." One of the most helpful things I got from this book was Borg's distinction between an earlier paradigm concerned with right beliefs and an emerging paradigm which focuses more on transformation and relationships.

Since I've already done a review of this book, let me tell you about some other books by Borg, who was Hundere Chair of Religion and Culture in the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University until his retirement in 2007. In Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, subtitled Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally, he makes it clear that stories need not have actually happened to be true. The Bible is the Word of God in a metaphorical sense and can be used as a way to help us see God. A few years ago I read The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions that Borg co-authored with N. Thomas Wright, a well-known conservative British New Testament scholar. Borg has co-authored three books with John Dominic Crossan, whom I met last year: The Last Week (2006), The First Christmas (2007), and The First Paul (2009). For a complete list of his books, check out his web site: http://marcusjborg.com.

Barbara Brown Taylor said of Borg, “With great clarity and pastoral genius, Borg offers questioning Christians a way to keep their faith without shutting down the search for truth.” She's the author of Leaving Church, that I reviewed here, and An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith, which I am currently reading to discuss with my book club.

The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith ~ by Marcus J. Borg, 2003, religion
Rated: 10/10

Fifteen books ~ #3 ~ The Great Transformation

Facebook has a meme going around encouraging people to name the "fifteen books that will always stick with you." This is the third on my alphabetical list.

The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions ~ by Karen Armstrong, 2006.

This book is meaningful to me because it shows that the major world religions emerged around the same time, as the result of a felt need for a spirituality of compassion to oppose the selfishness in their world. It happened in the ninth century BCE in four distinct regions of the world, where religious and philosophical traditions began that have continued ever since: Confucianism and Daoism* in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Armstrong calls that time the Axial Age, saying the sages of that pivotal time can speak to us as we experience the violence and hatred of our time. These are the spiritualities, according to her, that can challenge us and be the catalysts we need today. Rated: 10 of 10.
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* Daoism is often spelled Taoism, but it is pronounced as "dow-ism." Karen Armstrong herself spelled it with a "T" in her 2005 book A Short History of Myth.

Fifteen books ~ #2 ~ The Gnostic Gospels

Facebook has a meme going around encouraging folks to name "15 books that will always stick with you." This is the second one on my alphabetical list.

The Gnostic Gospels ~ by Elaine Pagels, 1979

I bought this book in hardback when it first came out in 1979 and read it avidly. It won awards (the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award) and has become a sort of landmark. I have seen it quoted in book after book. It was 1945 when a peasant turned up thirteen papyrus volumes in a place in Egypt called Nag Hamadi. These "books" that became known as gnostic gospels, from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge. These manuscripts showed a radically different view of early Christianity than what I'd learned so far, and I was fascinated. Scholars are still arguing about the early Gnostic Christians, but I was first introduced to them by this book. I found out that early Christians dared to ask questions that orthodox Christians later suppressed. I learned that Gnostic Christians did not have a hierarchical system, but shared leadership, even among women. I learned from Pagels's study of the Nag Hamadi scrolls that different doesn't necessarily mean wrong. You might say this book's scholarship led me to return to school for another degree: I went to Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta for an MDiv, a Master of Divinity degree. This book, as you can see, opened up a whole new world for me that led to being ordained in the United Methodist Church.

This is another of those books I've mentioned on my blogs before, like in the five books that mean a lot to me. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels is rated 10 out of 10, a book I couldn't put down.

Fifteen books ~ #1 ~ Agape Love

Facebook has a meme going around encouraging folks to name "15 books that will always stick with you." I was interested in seeing what books I would come up with that were meaningful to me. I had about twice this many on my list and narrowed it down by weighing how important each book had been in my reading life. I posted all 15 on my Facebook page, but here I'd rather share more about each book. Though I could have listed them in the order they came into my life, I listed them alphabetically.

Fifteen books ~ #1

Agape Love: A Tradition Found in Eight World Religions ~ by John Templeton, 1999

Altruistic love (agape) ties together all the major religions of the world. The first sentence in the book says:

"Agape love means feeling and expressing pure, unlimited love for every human being with no exception" (p. 1).

We could even ask, if a religion is without compassion, is it even a religion? When religious groups veer into hatred and violence against others, they have lost their focus.

"Perhaps without even being fully aware of it, religious leaders and their followers through the ages have defined religion largely in terms of love. ... any system of beliefs that teaches or tolerates hatred or even apathy toward others does not deserve to be considered a religion in the first place" (p. 2).

The eight religions Templeton lists in this book are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Native American Spirituality.

Islam: "The truly charitable person seeks out those in need who do not or cannot ask for help" (p. 39).

Hinduism: "Thus, agape can be viewed as a natural course of action for those operating at a high level of spirituality" (p. 49).

Confucianism: "Some people treat love as if it is a quanity that can be exhausted. They are careful not to use it up, not to love others for fear there will be none left for family and friends. But agape is unlimited. It cannot be 'used up.' in fact, to Confucius it was quite the opposite: the more we love, the more capable we become of loving" (p. 85).

Native American Spirituality: "One of the central characteristics of that Native American religion is its emphasis on caring for all creation ... Agape in the Native American context affirms that everything we see, hear, and touch is part of the web of life" (p. 95).

This book has been so meaningful to me that I've mentioned it over and over since I started blogging in January 2007:

March 2, 2007 ~ It's number 97 of a hundred books I had read, listed alphabetically by author.

May 2, 2007 ~ It's listed as my favorite book, in a list of 100 things about me. (See number 48.)

October 14, 2007 ~ It's on a list of five books that mean a lot to me, that actually numbered an even dozen.

I have used it in many classes I have taught, from Wednesday evening study groups at church to the college class on religions of the world. By now you have probably figured out that I rate this book: 10 of 10, couldn't put it down, even when reading it repeatedly.