If you like the quote in the title of this review, you’ll like this book. The words spoken by Sister Joan Chittister contain the kind of wisdom you’ll find throughout this short and mind-blowing book. While How to Live draws much of its wisdom from The Rule of St. Benedict and the monks and nuns who follow his Rule, the book is useful for anyone looking to lead a balanced life of service, rest, gratitude, and community. My only complaint about this book is that I […]
A Step Back
Whoo, this book was a struggle. There have been other books in the Gamache series that I didn’t particularly love, but I barely finished this one. It felt like a chore. A Beautiful Mystery has Inspector Gamache and his right-hand man, Inspector Beauvoir, investigating a murder of a monk at an extremely secluded monastery. I know I complained about a previous book in the series having too much going on (the one where he’s investigating the murder of an archaeologist), but this one had the […]
How to find the glory of the cosmos in your TPS reports.
I earned my undergraduate degree from a liberal arts school that was Christian. I liked it. It encouraged students to view the world and act in a holistic way. How does faith influence your business ethics? How does faith influence your understanding of the importance of the environment? How does a person’s faith influence political action? We wrestled with a lot of questions like that. One of my favorite courses was called Spiritual Pilgrims. The course encouraged a lot of practices and traditions that at […]
Monks and Spies in Tudor England
Okay, I’ll confess I read this trilogy out of order, and–worse–I reviewed them out of order, but I still highly recommend them if, like me, you’re an afficionado of good historical mysteries. Even more so since I just learned that this “trilogy” is about to have a sequel. Anyway… In this third novel, it is now 1584 and our hero Giordano Bruno is being stalked by someone through the streets of London. He has made a lot of enemies in Parris’ previous two books, and […]