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347. The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Nick Reader

Author:   Ben Shapiro

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Philosophy, Theology

288 pages, published March 19, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Right Side of History is Ben Shapiro’s take on the history of religion and philosophy in Western Civilization and how those two things were integral to America becoming a great and unique country.  However, he argues that we are in the midst of a crisis of purpose and ideas.  Our freedoms are built upon the two ideas that every human being is made in God’s image and that human beings were created with reason capable of exploring God’s world.  These precepts led to the birth of science, human rights, prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty.  They also built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty and gave billions spiritual purpose. Civilizations that rejected these ideas have collapsed into ignominy.  The USSR, Maoist China, Nazi Germany and modern day Venezuela rejected Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, substituting a new utopian vision of “social justice.”  The result was mass starvation and slaughter of tens of millions of human beings.  Shapiro warns that the United States is in the process of abandoning Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law, favoring instead moral subjectivism and the rule of passion.  The result if civilization collapse into tribalism, individualistic hedonism, and moral subjectivism.  The solution is to regain the moral purpose that drives us to be better individuals and assume the duty of working together for the greater good.

Quotes 

“We don’t live in a perfect world, but we do live in the best world that has ever existed.”

 

“What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.”

 

“The best countries—and the best societies—are those where citizens are virtuous enough to sacrifice for the common good but unwilling to be forced to sacrifice for the “greater” good. Flourishing societies require a functional social fabric, created by citizens working together—and yes, separately—toward a meaningful life.”

 

“Lasting happiness can only be achieved through cultivation of soul and mind. And cultivating our souls and minds requires us to live with moral purpose.”

 

“The creation story itself is designed to demonstrate how the first man, Adam, used his innate power of choice wrongly—and we are all Adam’s descendants.”

 

“What does this mean for human beings? What makes a man virtuous is his capacity to engage in the activities that make him a man, not an animal—man has a telos, too. What is our telos? Our end, according to both Plato and Aristotle, is to reason, judge, and deliberate.”

 

”a society of essential oils and self-esteem has replaced a society of logic.”

 

“That virtue took the form of courage—willingness to sacrifice life, fortune, and sacred honor in pursuit of defending the rights necessary to pursue virtue itself. That virtue took the form of temperance—no better founding document has ever been penned than the Constitution of the United States, the product of compromise. That virtue took the form of prudence—the practical wisdom of The Federalist Papers has not yet been surpassed in political thought. And that virtue took the form of justice—the rule of law, not of men, and the creation of a system where each receives his due.”

 

“Nazism didn’t arise from consumerism. It arose from communal purpose overriding individual purpose, and individual capacity abandoned in favor of worship of the communal capacity of the state. Nazism, in other words, lay a lot closer to Marxism than capitalism did.”

 

“Politics is about working to build the framework for the pursuit of happiness, not the achievement of it; politics helps us establish the preconditions necessary for happiness, but can’t provide happiness in and of itself.”

 

“Evil may so shape events that Caesar will occupy a palace and Christ a cross, but that same Christ will rise up and split history into A.D. and B.C., so that even the life of Caesar must be dated by his name. Yes, ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

 

“Christianity’s focus on grace rather than works makes it a far more accessible religion than Judaism in a practical sense. The commandments of Judaism are intricate and difficult. Christianity dispensed with the need for them. Faith is paramount.”

 

“We receive our notions of Divine meaning from a three-millennia-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Jews; we receive our notions of reason from a twenty-five-hundred-year-old lineage stretching back to the ancient Greeks. In rejecting those lineages—in seeking to graft ourselves to rootless philosophical movements of the moment, cutting ourselves off from our own roots—we have damned ourselves to an existential wandering.”

 

“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society,” Rousseau wrote. 

My Take

The Right Side of History was a Mother’s Day gift from my son Nick, a devotee of Ben Shapiro.  Nick and I share a conservative/libertarian philosophy and I was looking forward to reading Shapiro’s take on Western Civilization.  While the book is a bit dense at times with its lengthy history of philosophy, I wholeheartedly agreed with Shapiro’s conclusions and prescriptions for keeping America from plunging into the historical abyss and towards a free society that recognizes and values the individual while still expecting that individual to work within his or her community to improve the lives of others.  An interesting and worthwhile read.

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346. The King’s Curse

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Phillipa Gregory

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

592 pages, published August 14, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The King’s Curse is the final novel in the Cousins’ War series by renowned historical fiction author Phillipa Gregory.  It tells the fascinating story of the ups and downs of noble woman Margaret Pole, a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon and cousin of Elizabeth of York (the White Princess).  Margaret had a unique vantage point to witness the rise to power and eventual corruption of Henry VIII, one of history’s great monsters who was cursed to never produce a male heir.

Quotes 

“Thomas More once told me: lion or king, never show fear or you are a dead man.”

 

“A single man’s imperfect conscience can never be superior to centuries of tradition.”

 

“Life is a risk, who knows this better than me? Who knows more surely that babies die easily, that children fall ill from the least cause, that royal blood is fatally weak, that death walks behind my family like a faithful black hound?”

 

“But Elizabeth and I are accustomed to loss, we are Plantagenets—we dine on a diet of betrayal and heartbreak.”

 

“He was such a happy boy, and happiness is not memorable.” 

My Take

I’m a big fan of Philippa Gregory, the prolific writer of historical fiction in Britain.  Since starting my reading quest, I’ve read and enjoyed the following books by Gregory:  The Queen’s Fool, The Taming of the Queen, The Kingmaker’s Daughter, and The Last Tudor.  The King’s Curse did not disappoint.  Gregory makes you feel a part of history, delving into the lives, motivations, hopes and fears of historical figures that brings them and that part of history to life.  I have always had a particular interest in 14th and 15th Century British history and increased my understanding of the players and times of that era after reading The King’s Curse.

 

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340. Miracle Creek

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Drue Emerson

Author:   Angie Kim

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Crime

357 pages, published April 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Miracle Creek is a literary courtroom drama about a Korean immigrant family and a young, single mother accused of murdering her eight-year-old autistic son.  It takes place in a small Virginia town and explores the intertwining lives of people who are very different from each other.  All is not what it seems as the courtroom tension builds.

Quotes 

“But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together — one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad–every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness–resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.”

 

“to Americans, verbiage was an inherent good, akin to kindness or courage. They loved words—the more, the longer, and more quickly said, the smarter and more impressive.” 

My Take

In Miracle Creek, author Angie Kim combines compelling character studies with a taut courtroom drama.  You also come away from the book with a deeper understanding of the highs and lows of living with an autistic child.  A page turner of the best kind.

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339. The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Maxwell King

Genre:  Non Fiction, Biography, Psychology

416 pages, published September 4, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Good Neighbor is a biography of an American original, Fred Rogers (1928–2003), known and beloved by millions of children as Mr. Rogers.   In addition to creating his iconic children’s show, Fred was intensely devoted to children and their needs for understanding, compassion, equality, and kindness. Using original interviews, oral histories, and archival documents, author Maxwell King traces Rogers’s personal, professional, and artistic life through decades of work.

Quotes 

“You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”

 

“Mister Rogers speaks directly into the camera to the little children who are quietly, intently watching: “It helps to say that you’re sad. Often it even helps to cry . . . let people know how you feel.” This is Rogers’s signature message: feelings are all right, whatever is mentionable is manageable, however confusing and scary life may become. Even with death and loss and pain, it’s okay to feel all of it, and then go on.”

 

“You don’t set out to be rich and famous; you set out to be helpful.”

 

“In a now-famous Rogers dictum, delivered in speeches and in his books, he advises adults: “Please, think of the children first. If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their day care, their health, their education – please listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them.”

 

“The directions weren’t written in invisible ink on the back of my diploma. They came ever so slowly for me; and ever so firmly I trusted that they would emerge. All I can say is, it’s worth the struggle to discover who you really are.”

 

“Our job in life,” he said at a graduation ceremony at Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, early in his career, in 1969, “is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is—that each of us has something that no one else has—or ever will have—something inside which is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness, and to provide ways of developing its expression.”

 

“Fred Rogers never—ever—let the urgency of work or life impede his focus on what he saw as basic human values: integrity, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion, and of course his signature value, kindness.”

 

“It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life.”

 

“What a difference one person can make in the life of another. It’s almost as if he had said, ‘I like you just the way you are.”

 

“In a speech given at an academic conference at Yale University in 1972, Fred Rogers said, “The impact of television must be considered in the light of the possibility that children are exposed to experiences which may be far beyond what their egos can deal with effectively. Those of us who produce television must assume the responsibility for providing images of trustworthy available adults who will modulate these experiences and attempt to keep them within manageable limits.” Which is exactly what Rogers himself had tried to do with the production of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

 

“For his part, Fred McFeely always made sure his grandson knew, directly and sincerely, how much he enjoyed his company. “Freddy, you make my day very special,” McFeely frequently told the shy little boy, reminding him of his importance to the adults in his life.”

 

“The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away.”

 

“There are, essentially, two compelling reasons why I believe the reading public should care about Fred and his work: First, he recognized the critical importance of learning during the earliest years. No one better understood how essential it is for proper social, emotional, cognitive, and language development to take place in the first few years of life. And no one did more to convince a mass audience in America of the value of early education. Second, he provided, and continues to provide, exemplary moral leadership. Fred Rogers advanced humanistic values because of his belief in Christianity, but his spirituality was completely eclectic; he found merit in all faiths and philosophies. His signature value was human kindness; he lived it and he preached it, to children, to their parents, to their teachers, to all of us everywhere who could take the time to listen.”

 

“Every original and innovator doesn’t have to have psychedelic hair. There’s a cliché version of who’s an original. It’s always somebody making a lot of noise, and being disruptive of some status quo. His originality spoke for itself.” 

My Take

The mark of a good biography or memoir is after you finish reading it, you feel like you have a deep understanding of the person who is a subject.  This is definitely the case of The Good Neighbor.   Author Maxwell King does a superlative job of conveying not just the biographical facts of Fred Rogers’ life (which are interesting in and of themselves, e.g. he hated Dartmouth and transferred away from there as soon he could), but essence of the man himself.  You leave the book understanding what made Mr. Rogers tick and with a lot of respect and admiration for the life he lived.

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325. Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Kay Lynn Hartman

Author:   Dani Shapiro

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

272 pages, published January 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Inheritance, serial memoirist Dani Shapiro writes about her discovery (through an over the counter genetic test that she took on a lark) that the man she thought was her biological father was not.  Shapiro takes the reader with her as she pieces together the hidden story of her own life and discovers new insights about her past and present identity.

Quotes 

“To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land.”

 

“It turns out that it is possible to live an entire life—even an examined life, to the degree that I had relentlessly examined mine—and still not know the truth of oneself.”

 

“There is in each of us a fundamental split between what we think we know and what we know but may never be able to think.”

 

“Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?”

 

“The people who are with us by either happenstance or design during life-altering events become woven into the fabric of those events.”

 

“What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens – that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube – formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine – at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village – and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life.”

 

“After listening to my entire story, he quietly said: “You can say, “This is impossible, terrible.’ Or you can say, ‘This is beautiful, wonderful.’ You can imagine that you’re in exile. Or you can imagine that you have more than one home.” 

My Take

Inheritance is a book that really grew on me and that is in no small part due to the quality of the writing.  When I first started it, I found the author Dani Shapiro to be a bit overwrought in response to discovering that her biological father was a sperm donor.  However, as I got deeper into the book, I was able to relate more to her identity crisis.  I was also able to her speak at a Boulder Book Store author event and found her to be eloquent, empathetic and very moving.

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316. The Silent Wife

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   A.S.A. Harrison

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

326 pages, published June 25, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Silent Wife is a psychological thriller about a marriage that is at risk and how far one woman will go to keep what she believes to be rightfully hers.

Quotes 

“Life has a way of taking its toll on the person you thought you were.”

 

“Other people are not here to fulfill our needs or meet our expectations, nor will they always treat us well. Failure to accept this will generate feelings of anger and resentment. Peace of mind comes with taking people as they are and emphasizing the positive.”

 

“In asserting that people don’t change, what she means is that they don’t change for the better. Whereas changing for the worse, that goes without saying.”

 

“She didn’t know then that life has a way of backing you into a corner. You make your choices when you’re far too young to understand their implications, and with each choice you make the field of possibility narrows. You choose a career and other careers are lost to you. You choose a mate and commit to loving no other.”

 

“Basic personality traits develop early in life and over time become inviolable, hardwired. Most people learn little from experience, rarely thinking of adjusting their behavior, see problems as emanating from those around them, and keep on doing what they do in spite of everything, for better or worse.”

 

“We live alone in our cluttered psyches, possessed by our entrenched beliefs, our fatuous desires, our endless contradictions – and like it or not we have to put up with this in one another.  Do you want your man to be a man or do you want to turn him into a pussy? Don’t think you can have it both ways.”

 

“You will not be the same person coming out of a relationship as you were going into it.”

 

“Even if you forget that´s not the same as if it never happened. The slate is not entirely wiped clean; you can´t reclaim the person you were beforehand; your state of innocence is not there to be retrieved.”

 

“It’s money not education that’s the holy grail in America.”

 

“The woman who refuses to object, who doesn’t yell and scream—there’s strength in that, and power. The way she overrides sentiment, won’t enter into blaming or bickering, never gives him an opening, doesn’t allow him to turn it back on her. She knows that her refusal leaves him alone with his choices.”

 

“Acceptance is supposed to be a good thing – Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Also compromise, as every couples therapist will tell you. But the cost was high – the damping of expectation, the dwindling of spirit, the resignation that comes to replace enthusiasm, the cynicism that supplants hope. The mouldering that goes unnoticed and unchecked.”

 

“Time hangs suspended, and yet it’s about to end. Death should be a seduction, not a rape. Given one more minute he could do so much. Even the guilty are allowed to make a phone call, send a message. How alive he feels, how brightly he shines, like a lit fuse, a firecracker about to go off. What he wouldn’t give for a minute more, just one ordinary minute tacked crudely onto the end of his life.”

 

“As for herself, every morning on waking she gives thanks to the God she doesn’t disbelieve in. Although she can’t credit him with saving her, she needs this outlet for her gratitude.” 

My Take

Much in the same vein as Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, The Silent Wife was a page turner that I couldn’t put down.  Interesting insights into a long term marriage on the rocks, with some twists and turns that kept me engaged.  Great vacation read.

 

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314. The Nix

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Nancy Sissom

Author:   Nathan Hill

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

640 pages, published August 30, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Nix is a wide ranging, humorous novel about a son, the mother who left him as a child, and how his search to uncover the secrets of her life leads him to understand his own.

Quotes 

“Seeing ourselves clearly is the project of a lifetime.”

 

“if you make the easy choice every day, then it becomes a pattern, and your patterns become your life.”

 

“The flip side of being a person who never fails at anything is that you never do anything you could fail at. You never do anything risky. There’s a certain essential lack of courage among people who seem to be good at everything.”

 

“The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.”        

 

“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right now.”

 

“Sometimes we’re so wrapped up in our own story that we don’t see how we’re supporting characters in someone else’s.”

 

“about eighty percent of what you believe about yourself when you’re twenty turns out to be wrong. The problem is you don’t know what your small true part is until much later.”

 

“That, paradoxically, narrowing her concerns had made her more capable of love and generosity and empathy and, yes, even peace and justice. It was the difference between loving something out of duty—because the movement required it of you—and loving something you actually loved. Love—real, genuine, unasked-for love—made room for more of itself, it turned out. Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies.”

 

“Think about it. Why does one eat a snack? Why is a snack necessary? The answer—and we’ve done a million studies on this—is because our lives are filled with tedium and drudgery and endless toil and we need a tiny blip of pleasure to repel the gathering darkness. Thus, we give ourselves a treat. “But here’s the thing,” Periwinkle continues, his eyes all aglow, “even the things we do to break the routine become routine. Even the things we do to escape the sadness of our lives have themselves become sad. What this ad acknowledges is that you’ve been eating all these snacks and yet you are not happy, and you’ve been watching all these shows and yet you still feel lonely, and you’ve been seeing all this news and yet the world makes no sense, and you’ve been playing all these games and yet the melancholy sinks deeper and deeper into you. How do you escape?” “You buy a new chip.” “You buy a missile-shaped chip! That’s the answer. What this ad does is admit something you already deeply suspect and existentially fear: that consumerism is a failure and you will never find any meaning there no matter how much money you spend. So the great challenge for people like me is to convince people like you that the problem is not systemic. It’s not that snacks leave you feeling empty, it’s that you haven’t found the right snack yet. It’s not that TV turns out to be a poor substitute for human connection, it’s that you haven’t found the right show yet. It’s not that politics are hopelessly bankrupt, it’s that you haven’t found the right politician yet. And this ad just comes right out and says it. I swear to god it’s like playing poker against someone who’s showing his cards and yet still bluffing by force of personality.”

 

“And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.”

 

“It’s no secret that the great American pastime is no longer baseball. Now it’s sanctimony.”

 

“We are more politically fanatical than ever before, more religiously zealous, more rigid in our thinking, less capable of empathy. The way we see the world is totalizing and unbreakable. We are completely avoiding the problems that diversity and worldwide communication imply. Thus, nobody cares about antique ideas like true or false.”

 

“Blaming his students for being uninspired was so much easier than doing the work required to inspire them.”

 

“Samuel thought how his father married to his mother was like a spoon married to a garbage disposal.”

 

“Any problem you face in a video game or in life is one of four things: an enemy, obstacle, puzzle, or trap. That’s it. Everyone you meet in life is one of those four things.”

 

“You have to be careful,” Pwnage said, “with people who are puzzles and people who are traps. A puzzle can be solved but a trap cannot. Usually what happens is you think someone’s a puzzle until you realize they’re a trap. But by then it’s too late. That’s the trap.”

 

“But you cannot endure this world alone, and the more Samuel’s written his book, the more he’s realized how wrong he was. Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, you will find something familiar.”

 

“Eventually, all debts must be repaid.”

 

“Steak and chicken have too much baggage these days. Was it free-range? Antibiotic-free? Cruelty-free? Organic? Kosher? Did the farmer wear silken gloves to caress it to sleep every night while singing gentle lullabies? You can’t order a fucking hamburger anymore without embracing some kind of political platform.”

 

“In the story of the blind men and the elephant, what’s usually ignored is the fact that each man’s description was correct. What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp.” 

My Take

While The Nix is a long book, I was engrossed throughout and thoroughly enjoyed all of the characters and author Nathan Hill’s commentary on the times we live in.  I found the metaphors he used around video games to be particularly inspired.  I also highly recommend the Audiobook which had great narration.

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312. Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:   Nadia Bolz-Weber

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Theology, Christian

204 pages, published September 10, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint is a memoir by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran Pastor who started the Church of All Sinners and Saints in Denver and who took a very unlikely path to the clergy.  Bolz-Weber is a former standup comic, a recovering alcoholic, is heavily tattooed and regularly uses foul language.  In this book, she shares her theological insights and a personal narrative of a flawed, beautiful, and unlikely life of faith.

Quotes 

“God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word … it’s that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn’t about God creating humans and flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace – like saying, “Oh, it’s OK, I’ll be the good guy and forgive you.” It’s God saying, “I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

 

“Matthew once said to me, after one of my more finely worded rants about stupid people who have the wrong opinions, “Nadia, the thing that sucks is that every time we draw a line between us and others, Jesus is always on the other side of it.” Damn.”

 

“The image of God I was raised with was this: God is an angry bastard with a killer surveillance system who had to send his little boy (and he only had one) to suffer and die because I was bad. But the good news was that if I believed this story and then tried really hard to be good, when I died I would go to heaven, where I would live in a golden gated community with God and all the other people who believed and did the same things as I did…..this type of thinking portrays God as just as mean and selfish as we are, which feels like it has a lot more to do with our own greed and spite than it has to do with God.”

 

“I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive. Otherwise it can feel like I am worshipping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.”

 

“It would seem that when we are sinned against, when someone else does us harm, we are in some way linked to that sin, connected to that mistreatment like a chain. And our anger, fear, or resentment doesn’t free us at all. It just keeps us chained.”

 

“God was never about making me spiffy; God was about making me new.

New doesn’t always look perfect. Like the Easter story itself, new is often messy. New looks like recovering alcoholics. New looks like reconciliation between family members who don’t actually deserve it. New looks like every time I manage to admit I was wrong and every time I manage to not mention when I’m right. New looks like every fresh start and every act of forgiveness and every moment of letting go of what we thought we couldn’t live without and then somehow living without it anyway. New is the thing we never saw coming- never even hoped for- but ends up being what we needed all along.”

 

“Maybe the Good Friday story is about how God would rather die than be in our sin-accounting business anymore.”

 

“This is our God. Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps. A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us. Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross. Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering. This is a God who bears suffering. I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering; God transforms it.”

 

“Every human community will disappoint us, regardless of how well-intentioned or inclusive.”

 

“Forgiveness is a big deal to Jesus, and like that guy in high school with a garage band, he talks about it, like, all the time.”

 

“God’s grace is a gift that is freely given to us. We don’t earn a thing when it comes to God’s love, and we only try to live in response to the gift. No one is climbing the spiritual ladder. We don’t continually improve until we are so spiritual we no longer need God. We die and are made new, but that’s different from spiritual self-improvement. We are simultaneously sinner and saint, 100 percent of both, all the time. The Bible is not God. The Bible is simply the cradle that holds Christ. Anything in the Bible that does not hold up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ simply does not have the same authority. The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always. We can’t, through our piety or goodness, move closer to God. God is always coming near to us. Most especially in the Eucharist and in the stranger.”

 

“It happens to all of us,” I concluded that Easter Sunday morning. “God simply keeps reaching down into the dirt of humanity and resurrecting us from the graves we dig for ourselves through our violence, our lies, our selfishness, our arrogance, and our addictions. And God keeps loving us back to life over and over.”

 

“We want to go to God for answers, but sometimes what we get is God’s presence.”

 

“Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples. Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new. On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid. To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles, and like my friend Don did at Dylan Klebold’s funeral, that death is not the final word. To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it. And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, we still make our song alleluia. Alleluia. Alleluia.”

 

“The life changing seems always bracketed by the mundane. The quotidian wrapped around the profound, like plain brown paper concealing the emotional version of an improvised explosive device. Then, in a single interminable moment, when we discover the bomb, absolutely everything changes. But when we recall it from our now forever-changed lives, when we start with the plain brown wrapping, it looks like every other package, every other morning, every other walk.”

 

“Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing and saying, ‘Screw you. I’ll take the destruction please.’ God looked at tiny, little red-faced me and said, ‘that’s adorable,’ and then plunked me down on an entirely different path.”

 

“God’s grace is not defined as God being forgiving to us even though we sin. Grace is when God is a source of wholeness, which makes up for my failings. My failings hurt me and others and even the planet, and God’s grace to me is that my brokenness is not the final word. My selfishness is not the end-all… instead, it’s that God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit. Grace isn’t about God creating humans as flawed beings and then acting all hurt when we inevitably fail and then stepping in like the hero to grant us grace—like saying “Oh, it’s OK, I’ll be a good guy and forgive you.” It’s God saying, “I love the world too much to let your sin define you and be the final word. I am a God who makes all things new.”

 

“This is exactly, when it comes down to it, why most people do not believe in grace. It is fucking offensive.”

 

“When these kinds of things happen in my life, things that are so clearly filled with more beauty or redemption or reconciliation than my cranky personality and stony heart could ever manufacture on their own, I just have no other explanation than this: God.”

 

“This desire to learn what the faith is from those who have lived it in the face of being told they are not welcome or worthy is far more than “inclusion.” Actually, inclusion isn’t the right word at all, because it sounds like in our niceness and virtue we are allowing “them” to join “us”—like we are judging another group of people to be worthy of inclusion in a tent that we don’t own.”

 

“Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are. And maybe, just moments after Jesus’ baptism, when the devil says to him, “If you are the Son of God…” he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God. So if God’s first move is to give us our identity, then the devil’s first move is to throw that identity into question.”

 

“When what seems to be depression or compulsive eating or narcissism or despair or discouragement or resentment or isolation takes over, try picturing it as a vulnerable and desperate force seeking to defy God’s grace and mercy in your life. And then tell it to piss off and say defiantly to it, “I am baptized” or “I am God’s,” because nothing else gets to tell you who you are.”

 

“It was in those first couple months that I fell in love with liturgy, the ancient pattern of worship shared mainly in the Catholic, Lutheran, Orthodox, and Episcopal churches. It felt like a gift that had been caretaken by generations of the faithful and handed to us to live out and caretake and hand off. Like a stream that has flowed long before us and will continue long after us. A stream that we get to swim in, so that we, like those who came before us, can be immersed in language of truth and promise and grace. Something about the liturgy was simultaneously destabilizing and centering; my individualism subverted by being joined to other people through God to find who I was. Somehow it happened through God. One specific, divine force.” 

My Take

Pastrix is a compelling, well written memoir.  Author Nadia Bolz-Weber is a strong writer has a lot of new and powerful things to say.  I also appreciated her explanations of how things work in a church.  For example, her explanation on the liturgy was very interesting and informative.  As a recovering alcoholic, heavily tattooed former standup comedian, she comes at religion for a different angle than books that I have previously read.  While I didn’t agree with everything she wrote, she certainly gave me a lot to think about and broadened my perspective on several theological issues.  Recommended.

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311. Educated

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tara Westover

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir

334 pages, published February 20, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Educated is a memoir by Tara Westover, a remarkable woman who grew up in large family from a very small town in Idaho.  Her parents were Mormon survivalists and believed that public education was an indoctrination scheme by the Socialist government.  Consequently, Tara never went to school until she got into BYU after obtaining a GED and taught herself enough math to perform sufficiently well on the SAT.  She would go on to ultimately receive a PhD from Cambridge University.   Educated is her story of that journey and the pain she had to endure at the hands of her parents and a few siblings who actively tried to undermine all of her efforts and, in the case of her brother Shawn, physically abused her to keep her in her place.

Quotes 

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.”

 

“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”

 

“We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.”

 

“The thing about having a mental breakdown is that no matter how obvious it is that you’re having one, it is somehow not obvious to you. I’m fine, you think. So what if I watched TV for twenty-four straight hours yesterday. I’m not falling apart. I’m just lazy. Why it’s better to think yourself lazy than think yourself in distress, I’m not sure. But it was better. More than better: it was vital.”

 

“It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.”

 

“It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune.”

 

“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”

 

“There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”

 

“Choices, numberless as grains of sand, had layered and compressed, coalescing into sediment, then into rock, until all was set in stone.”

 

“I began to experience the most powerful advantage of money: the ability to think of things besides money.”

 

“Curiosity is a luxury for the financially secure.”

 

“I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that, when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed, cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations.”

 

“The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.  You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.

I call it an education” 

My Take

Educated is an extremely well written, fascinating book that gives the reader an inside look at life growing up inside a Mormon fundamentalist, survivalist family in an isolated Idaho town.  Raised by tyrannical, crazy father who denied her any type of education and a mother who refused to protect her from an abusive older brother, it is truly remarkable that Tara Westover would go on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University in the UK.  While her story is incredibly impressive, I often grew frustrated by her continual, and I mean continual, efforts over many, many years to be a part of a family that so betrayed her.  When she finally, finally realizes that what she seeks is not possible, my response was, “well, it’s about time!”  Still, I highly recommend Educated, an engrossing book.

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308. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mark Manson

Genre:  Non Fiction, Self Improvement, Psychology, Happiness

224 pages, published September 13, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

In this original take on a self-help guide, prolific blogger Mark Manson provides the reader with his take on how to truly become a better, happier person.  Manson eschews positivity and affirmations.  Manson argues that because humans are flawed and limited, we should get to know our limitations and accept them.  Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties, and start confronting painful truths, then we can find the courage, perseverance, honesty, responsibility, curiosity, and forgiveness we seek and need to be happy.

Quotes 

“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”

 

“Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.  Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.”

 

“Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.”

 

“Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.”

 

“The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values. If I choose to make my marriage the most important part of my life, that means I’m (probably) choosing not to make cocaine-fueled hooker orgies an important part of my life. If I’m choosing to judge myself based on my ability to have open and accepting friendships, that means I’m rejecting trashing my friends behind their backs. These are all healthy decisions, yet they require rejection at every turn. The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X.”

 

“This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.”

 

“You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.”

 

“But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.”

 

“The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.”

 

“It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.”

 

“There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances. We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond. Whether we consciously recognize it or not, we are always responsible for our experiences. It’s impossible not to be. Choosing to not consciously interpret events in our lives is still an interpretation of the events of our lives.”

 

“To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action.”

 

“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.”

 

“Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other—in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.”

 

“Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”

 

“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”

 

“Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps it’s not necessarily the best way to live.”

 

“Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.”

 

“Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.”

 

“Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.”

 

“Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when they walk into the room. Everybody wants that. It’s easy to want that. A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.”

 

“Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.”

 

“The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies—that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as “Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.” This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.”

 

“People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.”

 

“I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.”

 

“Commitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous. Commitment gives you freedom because it hones your attention and focus, directing them toward what is most efficient at making you healthy and happy. Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again? Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you otherwise would.”

 

“Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.”

 

“If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.”

 

“Because here’s something that’s weird but true: we don’t actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating. Don’t trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn’t. And that’s not worth much.”

 

“this is what’s so dangerous about a society that coddles itself more and more from the inevitable discomforts of life: we lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from the reality of the world around us.”

 

“We are so materially well off, yet so psychologically tormented in so many low-level and shallow ways. People relinquish all responsibility, demanding that society cater to their feelings and sensibilities. People hold on to arbitrary certainties and try to enforce them on others, often violently, in the name of some made-up righteous cause. People, high on a sense of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of trying something worthwhile and failing at it.”

 

“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.”

 

“My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.

The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you’re uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.”

 

“Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet.”

My Take

While I never use the “f” word and not a big fan of its constant use in this book, I was still very impressed with many of the sentiments and ideas articulated by Mark Manson.  Like 12 Rules for Life:  An Antidote to Chaos and The Happiness Project, this book is chock full of excellent advice on how to live a better life.

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