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December 8, 2008
The Second Annual Paul Nicholas Mason Christmas Selection
Sometimes There Is Room
Is this a Christmas story? I think it is, though the dates are a little off. You be the judge.
Back when I was in high school — a high school in rural Kingston — one of my classmates, a girl of seventeen, conceived a child. It’s an old story; happens all the time. Her family was horrified, and she had to flee to a friend’s home for a few nights because her father was so angry and her mother so distraught. That’s an old story, too. Happily, and maybe unusually, her boyfriend recognised his responsibilities and stood by her. That took some character, because his own parents had harsh words for the girl and urged him to have nothing further to do with her. Read the complete story . . .
February 27, 2008
I would write an ode to hardware, software, and tech geeks if I had the energy, offering thanks to the latter for saving my bacon in regard to the first two. After a thorough meltdown about a month ago we are finally getting back on track with the possibility of adding some content to this site. I’m also looking into ways of making the making of this site a bit more user-friendly for yours truly; at the moment the process is klunky and time-consuming, which tends to push it to the back burner.
However, we’re back on the case and will see what we can do betwixt and between the freelance lifestyle that has been imposed on us as we’ve tried to contribute something to the world we live in. So please keep checking in and I hope to make some changes here that will benefit all who are interested.
And remember, if you have any reason to purchase anything from Amazon or Powells, please consider entering their sites through the links you’ll find on every page of Nimble Spirit. Every little bit helps.
Happy Leap Year!
December 15, 2007
Just added at Nimble Spirit (in our never- ending quest to actually show up here with something NEW once in a while!):
A Special Selection
for the
Christmas Season:
Tala’s Gift by Paul Nicholas Mason.
Mason, a Canadian raconteur with a touch of Garrison Keillor, Jean Shepherd, and Gamble Rogers about him, is the author of Battered Soles, three plays, and the forthcoming novel The Red Dress.
Also, a few new book reviews:
Hush: An Irish Princess’ Tale
by Donna Jo Napoli
The Cure
by Athol Dickson
One Hundred Great Catholic Books
by Don Brophy
Best wishes for a great holiday season and new year.
September 19, 2007
A new Nimble Spirit feature, "Nimble Spirit at Gather," is now available at Gather.com. Follow this link to the Nimble Spirit at Gather web page and follow the instructions to join Gather (FREE) and participate in or start a conversation.
The first post at Gather is the following. Join in and put in your two cents:
At some time or another most of us have been challenged to name our “desert island” choices: What music or book would you want to have with you if you were stuck indefinitely on a desert island?
Well, Nimble Spirit has this question for you:
If you were stuck indefinitely on a desert island, what 3 pieces of spiritual literature—fiction, nonfiction, scripture, poetry, whatever—would you want to have with you?
Send your answer to the nimblespirittalk group at Gather.com, and include 3-5 sentences about the reasons behind each of your choices. Let’s see how many books and authors we can turn one another on to.
September 4, 2007
Review
Epiphanies & Elegies by Brian Doyle
Several years ago Brian Doyle told me that he’d like to publish, when he’s about eighty years old, a collection of the little poems he has made and found and tossed into the ether over the years but that won’t amount to a critical mass worth publishing till he’s at least that old. Apparently someone talked him into pulling those pages together about thirty years ahead of schedule, and we should be glad they did. Read the Review
Review
On Kingdom Mountain by Howard Frank Mosher
Somewhere along the line a few years ago I picked up a copy of Howard Frank Mosher’s novel In the Fall of the Year. I think it was at a book trade show. It was maybe another two years before I actually cracked the book open and read it, then smacked myself on the head and asked “What was I waiting for?,” and undertook to read the rest of Mosher’s work. Read the Review
July 8, 2007
Review
God’s Echo by Sandy Sasso
About midway through her eminently accessible and perfectly tuned little book, Rabbi Sandy Sasso recounts a tale from Abraham Joshua Heschel’s childhood. When the future scholar, sage, and ecumenist first heard the story of the binding of Isaac, he began to weep inconsolably. “But, rabbi,” the future co-worker of Dr. King asked his teacher, “what if the angel had come a second too late?” Read the Review
Review
Roots and Wings by Margaret Silf
. . . Be not afraid, Silf tells those who are devoted to Jesus. Neither of science, nor of empirical evidence, nor of hard questions, nor of your own imagination. “Do you think creation has ‘peaked’ in homo sapiens, or are we going farther?” Before addressing questions like that, Silf says, Take a deep breath, stay calm, go only as far as you’d like. Read the Review
Review
The Poetics of Space and The Poetics of Reverie by Gaston Bachelard
Bachelard’s powers of meditative reflection and his profound reverence for the physical world deepened self-awareness about how I experience a dwelling and the significance my dwelling space has for me. Read the Review
June 4, 2007
Curators of Meteorites, Inspectors of Snow-Storms
It tickled me, perhaps more than one might expect, when I read that the author of a column on the back page of the British Catholic weekly, The Tablet, “is the curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory.”
Tickled as I was, I turned to the friend sitting beside me, showed him the author bio, and said, “Charles, can that really be a fulltime job?”
I’m a job-seeker these days, so I guess I think that way sometimes.
Help Wanted: Large institutional religious organization seeks curator of meteorites.
Help Wanted: Archivist of tree bark to organize collection of Protestant sect.
Help Wanted: Buddhist dot.org seeks indexer of creeks and streams.
And then I thought of that old pal of mine, Henry David Thoreau, and some of the “jobs” he had in and around Concord, Massachusetts and the pond called Walden:
For a long time I was reporter to a journal, of no very wide circulation, whose editor has never yet seen fit to print the bulk of my contributions, and, as is too common with writers, I got only my labor for my pains. However, in this case my pains were their own reward.
For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.
I have looked after the wild stock of the town, which give a faithful herdsman a good deal of trouble by leaping fences; and I have had an eye to the unfrequented nooks and corners of the farm; though I did not always know whether Jonas or Solomon worked in a particular field to-day; that was none of my business. I have watered the red huckleberry, the sand cherry and the nettle-tree, the red pine and the black ash, the white grape and the yellow violet, which might have withered else in dry seasons.
It felt good to read that again.
[For a bit of Thoreauvian fun, click here]
May 25, 2007
Cosmology Cavalcade
I had the privilege to be involved in the making of a brand new book by John Kotre titled The Story of Everything.* In this little book, John uses an extended parable to find a way by which the “competing” cosmologies of religion and science might better coexist. The Story of Everything is a unique, compelling, and welcome addition to the literature that deals with this aspect of the “culture wars” that plague our society.
Stories of ultimate beginnings have always fascinated me. That there are so many of them is no surprise, given the diversity found on the planet in terms of geography, climate, and general living conditions. One could hardly expect peoples, preliterate or otherwise, to come up with common expressions of their origins when day-to-day experience ranges from Arctic ice to Saharan desert to Amazon rainforest to Rocky Mountains. Life experience at the 65th parallel will undoubtedly lead to a different cosmology than that at the equator. The cosmology of people who are enslaved will be different from that of those who enslave them. And then science brings its own vast set of empirical observation to bear on our exploration.
John Kotre revels in the diversity of stories and the way we pass them from generation to generation. In The Story of Everything he explores religious and scientific cosmologies, and, by way of parable, creates a new cosmology that is traditional, contemporary, mythological, and scientific.
To support this effort, John has created a website called The Story-of-Everything Place. Here, he invites discussion of his parable; but more importantly, he invites readers to share their own stories of everything. The Story-of-Everything Place is bound to become a sort of cosmological bazaar where people can bring the stories they’ve been told since they were children, as well as create new stories.
It’s a big universe, worthy of many stories. John Kotre is giving us all a chance to join in the play of it all.
*If you click on the Amazon link, don’t be put off by the slightly different title; a late alteration by the publisher has apparently not been updated in the various bookselling databases.
May 20, 2007
Reflections on Literary Spirituality:
Why I Wrote The Seeker Academy as a
Realistic Novel
by L. D. Gussin
The Western spiritual-based counterculture called variously new age, holistic, human potential (its first name), east-west, integral and mind-body-spirit took direct inspiration from major Western literary figures. Yet, during most of its fifty-year history, literary critics have dismissed it as a subject—even while, as a maker of meaning, the movement reaches many more people than do literary works.
Read the essay
New Poems in the Nimble Spirit
Poetry Gallery:
Martin Burke, Robert Elzy Cogswell, Kim M. Baker, Fred Allen, Tom Gibbs, Leonore Wilson, Duane Tucker
Review
Short Trip to the Edge by Scott Cairns
An acclaimed poet and a Baptist-raised convert to Greek Orthodoxy, Scott Cairns proves himself to be an engaging companion in this account of his pilgrimages to Mount Athos. His goal, to experience “genuine prayer, prayer of a sort I could only suspect, and desire” is a worthy and elusive one. Read the review
Review
Grace Period by Gerald Haslam
Gerald Haslam’s reputation as a writer seems to have limited general knowledge of his work to folks out West. Born in Bakersfield, California, he was raised in that state’s Great Central Valley, and much of his work has been set there. But, like writers such as Wendell Berry of Kentucky, Haslam takes on issues and situations that transcend specific places but are effectively grounded by the concreteness of those places because of the author’s love of his place and his ability to share it with readers who have no firsthand knowledge of it. Read the review
May 1, 2007
Review:
Returning to Earth by Jim Harrison
The characters Jim Harrison imagines are largely untamed by suburban ways of life. Even as they enjoy their meals and notice sublime scenes in nature, one notes that Harrison’s creations have not been smoothed by money, business, fashion, or technology. Haunted and challenged in a number of ways, they struggle against themselves and against one another in settings of rural isolation. Read the review
Review:
The Red Thread by Roderick Townley
The Red Thread tells a story that covers a period of 500 or so years and in which the heroine, a present-day sixteen-year-old student and photographer Dana Landgrave, discovers through dreams and hypnosis that she has lived two earlier incarnations, and that events in those lives continue to have implications in her life in twenty-first-century New Hampshire. Dana’s story grabs you from the beginning and is hard to put down . . . Read the review
Review:
Saving Erasmus by Steven Cleaver
In Saving Erasmus, his brief and breezy first novel, Steven Cleaver tells the story of Andrew Benoit, a recent seminary graduate facing a choice between a big-city assignment and something that feels like banishment to a small town. True to the idea of “call,” like a modern-day Jonah, Andrew finds himself in the small town of Erasmus facing a daunting first assignment: Heed your call to be a prophet and save the town immediately, for the Angel of Death is set to destroy the faithless place in one week. Read the review
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