What book are you reading at the moment?

I just got a new book from my mother for my birthday...she teaches at a Catholic High School, so she sends me the best of their stuff.

Reading currently The Holy Longing by Ronals Rolheiser.
 
The book I finished most recently was a biography of Anais Nin (I think that's even what it was called, can't check as its back at the library already.) She was an amazing woman, to be sure. I'm usually always reading something, as time allows, although I often find it hard to finish books in short order.
 
Beyone Belief by Elaine Pagels (about the Gospel of Thomas)
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Plan of Attack by Bob Woodward
Against All Enemies by Richard Clark
A book about drumming by the drummer for the Grateful Dead (can't remember the title)
re-reading parts of The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck (one of my all-time favorite books)
Lots of different magazines and news pieces off the web.

Maggie
 
right now i'm reading....

my e-mail

a book of poetry by Adrienne Rich (the fact of a door frame)

a rather lurid biography of Robert Stroud (the birdman of alcatraz)

the varieties of religious experience (i love this book...and keep coming back to it)
 
I've been reading "Portals to Freedom" by Howard Colby Ives, a Unitarian Minister who met Abdul-Baha on His 1912 visit to America... this was actually a "re-reading" of the same book I read over thirty years ago... I'm comparing what i remembered reading with my current re-reading and the book has held it's interest to me over the years.

I've also been read some of Kahlil Gibran's books "The Prophet" "The Garden of the Prophet" as well as one by a friend of his Mikhail Naimy "The Book of Mirdad". Both Gibran and Naimy have similar perspectives and it's interesting to compare them.

Finally I've been reading "The Poetry of Tahirih" by John Hatcher and Amrollah Hemmat. Tahirih was a Babi heroine and martyr of mid-nineteenth century Persia who championed the cause of the liberation of women in a country that even to this day has retained a medieval suppression of women.

Tahirih's poetry is widely appreciated even to this day in the middle east even though much of it was destroyed after her death.
 
Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine said:
I finished White Gold Wielder, and am now reading Cats In Space and Other Places (which is an anthology of feline related scifi/fantasy stories collected by Bill Fawcett.) The oldest story in the collection is from 1939,and the newest ones are from 1991 (the anthology is from 1992.)

I shall soon be reading a heck of a lot more books at the same time (school begins September 2 for me.)

Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine
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have you read Heinlins the Cat that Could Walk Through Walls?

seems nobody told it that it couldn't.....
 
Picked up my copy of Ehrman's "Lost Christianities." Just in time for some holiday reading.

Tommorrow is Thanksgiving.

To all the U.S. folks: Happy Thanksgiving!

To everyone else: "Happy Thursday!"
 
I picked up Peshat and Derash by David Weiss Halivni yesterday from the campus library (it was a book recommended by our beloved bb in another forum.) I'm going to be reading it over the loooooooooooooong weekend.

Phyllis Sidhe_Uaine
 
I am reading now "Royal Assasin", by Robin Hobb. With this one, I finish the Farseer Trilogy.
 
Holly Quran (english version) - Abu al-Qasim Muhammad ibn 'Abd Allah ibn 'Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim
 
Finally picked up J. Campbell The Power of Myth. What a great little book. Just finished the chapter Sacrifice and Bliss, underlined most everything from p 133-143. Have to share a couple of lines:

"Jesus on the cross, the Buddha under the tree--these are the same figures. And the cherubim at the gate--who are they? At the Buddhist shrines you'll see one has his mouth open, the other has his mouth closed--fear and desire, a pair of oppsites. If you're approaching a garden like that, and those two figures there are real to you and threaten you, if you have fear for your life, you are still outside the garden. But if you are no longer attached to your ego existence, but see the ego existence as a function of a larger, eternal totality, and you favor the larger against the smaller, then you won't be afraid of those two figures, and you will go through." (p. 133)

If one is to be reborn, death is necessary first. Who is it that dies?

"...Abelard offered as an explanation of the crucifixion: that the Son of God came down into this world to be crucified to awaken our hearts to compassion, and thus to turn our minds from the gross concerns of raw life in the world to the specifically human values of self-giving in shared suffering."

Campbell puts into words, supported by thousands of years worth of observations, what I have sensed and crave. I'm sure this is just a function of having absorbed many of these thoughts subconsciously over the years, ideas that are ready to be born. If I've even had a bona fide personal revelation, it was simply the word compassion.
 
Hi Lunamoth,


i really enjoy Josephs' writings quite a bit. he has a way with the words that tends to make some aspects of religious thought more clear to me.

so.. you're reading the book, not watching the documentary? if you've not seen it, i would highly recommend it. there is something about seeing and hearing him speak with the passion that he has for the subject.

for my own part, i've recently started a text called Becomming Vajrasattva, which is a Tantric purification practise guide written by Lama Yeshe.
 
Vajradhara said:
Hi Lunamoth,


i really enjoy Josephs' writings quite a bit. he has a way with the words that tends to make some aspects of religious thought more clear to me.

so.. you're reading the book, not watching the documentary? if you've not seen it, i would highly recommend it. there is something about seeing and hearing him speak with the passion that he has for the subject.

for my own part, i've recently started a text called Becomming Vajrasattva, which is a Tantric purification practise guide written by Lama Yeshe.
Click to expand...

Hi Vaj,

I just finished the book last night. Perhaps I'll see if I can rent the documentary sometime soon. By the end of the book I almost started to think of his synthesis as his own religion, "Campbellism." Sort of a mystic path and not for the faint of heart. He really seems to emphasize the parallels between Christianity and Buddhism, at least in this book. I think I'm primed to read some more Merton.
 
I'm just finishing Jew in the Lotus which is about a group of Jews representing different denominations traveling to meet the Dalai llama(sp) and share wisdom with each other from each tradition, finding commonality, sharing secrets, all that good stuff. The real people make such great characters, like Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, Yitz and Blu Greenberg, Moshe Waldoks, Jonathan Omer-Man, the Dalai Llama(sp), etc.


Dauer
 
Namaste lunamoth,


if you're going to start with some Merton, may i recommend the Seven Story Mountain, which is his autobiography.
 
Just finished Ballad of the Whiskey Robber, about the Hungarian bank and post office robber, and hockey goalie, Attila Ambrus. An entertaining read (if a little heavy on the rock journalism style) of an interesting character, as much a victim of Communism and its fall as he was of avarice.
 
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