The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004 by Philip Zaleski


The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004
Title : The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0618443037
ISBN-10 : 9780618443031
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 304
Publication : First published October 14, 2004

Since its inception in 1915, the Best American series has become the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. For each volume, a series editor reads pieces from hundreds of periodicals, then selects between fifty and a hundred outstanding works. That selection is pared down to twenty or so very best pieces by a guest editor who is widely recognized as a leading writer in his or her field. This unique system has helped make the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.
The latest addition to the esteemed Best American series is a collection of the best spiritual writing of the year, introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jack Miles and including both prose and poetry. Series editor Philip Zaleski has chosen the volume's pieces with an eye to spirituality's many guises, from its impact on personal relationships and the environment to politics, creativity, and literature. Christian, Muslim, Jewish, secular, and pan-Hindu perspectives are all represented in these pieces, which have been selected from both mainstream and more specialized periodicals.

The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004 Reviews

  • Patty

    I have many of the volumes in this series and I like them all. I can't just sit down and read these essays and poems straight through, this is a book to savor. There is no question as to why these are picked as the best.

    I especially liked the poetry by Cairns, Levine, Hoey and Wright. One of my favorite authors, Kathleen Norris has an essay and I also enjoyed Natalie Goldberg. It is hard to pick the essays I liked the best, but Robin Cody's was amazing and Miroslav Volf's essay on God's shining face will be giving me food for thought for awhile.

    If you are looking for an eclectic collection of essays, that somehow fit the definition of spiritual writing, this is the series for you. If you are interested in good, thought-provoking writing, this is also for you. The theme "spiritual seems to encompass a wide range of writing.

  • cubbie

    (Dog Eared Books)

    i had great mixed feelings about this book, which i guess is kind of a recommendation for it. if i'd agreed with all of the essays, something important would have been missing. but admittedly, i got a little exhausted by the large quantity of scientific essays.

    "Good spiritual literature-- and, I would suggest, all good literature-- finds its voice in struggle, in the interlocked battles that each of us fights between truth and illusion, hope and despair, love of other and love of self."
    ~"Foreword" by Philip Zaleski

    "Refuse to deny what you know but consent to how little that will always be, and, when the moment comes, the sky will open and the liberating intrusion will descend upon you."
    ~"Introduction" by Jack Miles

    " His body no longer
    Seems his own; he screams in pain to drown
    Out the wind inside his ear, and curses God
    Who, hours ago, was a benign generalization
    In a world going along well enough."
    ~"Parable of the Moth" by Robert Cording

    "Prayer didn't save my mother in the way I'd believed, when I was ten, that it had saved my cat. But it did something else. Praying is nothing if not paying attention, the dive becomes sloppy, the dig a waste of time. Without attention, prayer becomes remote and meaningless. During my mother's illness, I paid a lot of attention-- to every word the doctor said to every movement of his face as he felt her tumor each week, to how her skin tightened and her rings loosened on her fingers and her ankles swelled and her lips chapped and her smile took up ever more of her increasingly gaunt face. By giving me a place to fall apart-- to scream and weep and plead and, yes, to disappear-- prayer gave me strength."
    ~"The Water Will Hold You: A Daughter at Prayer"
    by Lindsey Crittenden

    "My Christian friends have little understanding, and in some cases, little patience with my attempt to stand in this 'place where there is no place to stand.' Christianity, they remind me, is an encompassing vision that interprets the world completely. How could anything lie beyond the roadmap? Abe's Buddhism must be the work of the Holy Spirit. Even though Buddhists do not realize it, they too give praise to the Creator of heven and earth. In this, of course, my Christian friends speak a great Christian truth. Nothing created by God has been abandoned. No corner of reality is God-forsaken. While I stand within this Christian theological roadmap, however, the face of my friend and teacher is no longer recognizable. Looking on Masao Abe as an 'anonymous Christian' does violence to our friendship. The sacramental instincts of my Catholic spirituality pose a great temptation to redraw the lines of my friend's face into my own image and likeness."
    ~"Masao Abe: A Spiritual Friendship" by James Fredericks

    "I needed to know the genetic origin of words. Their family tree. I mean, without that, all words are adopted. They grow up angry foster children wanting to burn things down. I wanted to know their mother and grandmother. I wanted to know their Adam, their Eve, their Eden, their original sin. Knowledge."
    ~"Word Hoard" by B. K. Loren