In this second installment of her four-book series, spiritual coach Namou continues to describe her personal journey through a shamanic school known as The Mystery School. Taking up where the first book left off, Weam shares some of her meaningful telephone discussions with mentor Lynn Andrews—for example, it’s important to “be responsible for yourself, before you can be responsible to deal at all with anyone else.” As Namou’s second year in The Mystery School requires her to expand her studies, the book includes descriptions of conversations with her second-year mentor, Fiona. During these conversations with Fiona, other participants from Namou’s Mystery School cohort chime in to ask pertinent questions that push their collective spiritual journey forward. In addition to relating her experience with The Mystery School, Namou divulges more about her personal and family life, including her relationship with her husband, Sudaid, and their eight-year struggle with immigration into the United States. By the end of book two, readers will see firsthand that settling her undecided immigration status gave way for Namou to feel more freedom to write. (BookLife)

Reviewed on 01/06/2017 | Details & Permalink

Connecting with plant spirits by growing magical plants yourself is the ultimate in herbal magic, according to this debut. Roth leans heavily on a modernized version of the ancient Doctrine of Signatures that teaches practitioners to look to a plant’s morphology to understand its use, adding clues from growth patterns, traditional medicine, and chemistry as well as from traditional lore and personal gnosis. Though there are extended planting and care notes for every plant, Roth makes his picks according to their reputation in traditional European witchcraft rather than ease of cultivation. He includes several of the baneful herbs he calls the “Weird Sisters”—datura, mandrake, belladonna, and henbane—but, although some traditional recipes are included in the practice section, Roth never recommends consumption, stating that practitioners should pursue them “through direct spiritual contact” rather than by stepping onto the rickety bridge of alkaloid consumption. Sections on “practice” included in each entry add up to a primer in herbal magic methods, so readers learn how to make tinctures with clary sage, dry and powder herbs with yarrow, and unguents with vervain. Roth views the herb magician as spiritual seeker rather than rules-bound potion maker, an attitude that can be unfortunately rare in more encyclopedic botanical magic guidebooks. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2017 | Details & Permalink

Thompson takes a smattering of biblical characters (David, Joseph, Miriam, Naomi, Sarah, among others), gives them fuller storylines than the Bible depicts, and details how waiting played crucial roles in each of their lives. While the book never professes to be an exactly accurate recreation and Thompson fabricates much of what might have taken place, she does base her embellishments squarely upon Scripture. Each of the author’s 12 profiles is complete with contemporary life parallels in which waiting can engender impatience, anger, bitterness, depression, pity, and discouragement. Thompson guides readers through these potential pitfalls and offers Christians pointed introspective questions at the close of each chapter to provide strength in the midst of life’s waiting rooms. Christ followers will appreciate her full-bodied “fill-in-the-blanks” stories but may be put off by sporadic, inconsistent attempts to insert humor into the narrative. In the end, Thompson achieves her purpose of highlighting the positive aspects of learning to wait in the midst of emotional suffering, physical pain, or crushing disappointment. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2017 | Details & Permalink

Becker (What Is an Anabaptist Christian?) offers a concise, informative, insightful history of Christian Anabaptists timed to the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. The Anabaptist tradition, including Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, and Brethren in Christ, grew out the tumultuous Reformation in northern Europe, but found favor with neither Catholics nor Protestants—in part because Anabaptists refused to fight in war. Now Anabaptists are in 80 countries; two-thirds are in the Global South. Becker is a Canadian Mennonite pastor, educator, and missionary with a delightfully empirical mind. His book is built on three concepts (Jesus, community, reconciliation), from which proceed three key statements: “Jesus is the center of our faith; 2) community is the center of our lives; and 3) reconciliation is the center of our work.” The section on Anabaptists and conflict should be assigned reading for every Christian for its clear-eyed assessment of conflict and its effective nonviolent strategies for engaging and transforming it. “Reconciling conflict is hard work.... However, there is no greater joy than to live a reconciled life,” writes Becker. This slim volume, with illustrative graphics and discussion questions, is an easy, engaging read for those who want to learn, or be reminded of, what Christianity is all about. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2017 | Details & Permalink

Merrick, speaker and pastor’s wife, details the harrowing journey of caring for her young daughter Daisy from a cancer diagnosis in 2009 until her eventual death in 2013. Speaking from the heart, she regales just how profound her suffering was at each stage of her young child’s cancer battle, and how God revealed Himself to her along the way. In telling her story and pain, Merrick has created an accessible, heart-wrenching primer on dealing with the worst life has to offer that is equally poignant and inspirational. Not confined to sadness, Merrick is also often funny, and her comical antics bring some needed lightness to this heavy topic. Readers will find their own way through grief as Merrick points out the power of small lights of hope found in everyday joys. True to her subtitle, she is defiant in finding courage, hope, and a stalwart trust in God as she continues to feel the loss of her daughter. Merrick’s deeply personal story will be great medicine for the brokenhearted, downhearted, and downtrodden. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2017 | Details & Permalink

Feiler (Walking the Bible) addresses the impact that the first couple, and their complex experiences in and out of Eden, have had on Western society. While some of the insights are expected and cover well-trod ground, such as his discussions of Michelangelo and other artists, others are surprising and open trajectories into popular culture, as he considers the influence of Adam and Eve on people like Mae West and Frank Sinatra. Feiler explores how the larger paradigm of love, loss, recovery, and redemption in the Eden story has cast a long and enduring shadow across the wide spectrum of popular art and culture. “Humans might spoil the garden, but love never dies,” he writes, and this undying love of God for people, and people for each other, can all be best understood in light of the Eden narratives. Taking the oldest story of romance and giving it a new gloss, this book may be Feiler’s best work yet. A wonderfully readable, powerfully presented look into the influence of the original love. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2017 | Details & Permalink

Glinert, professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth, provides an insightful, entertaining, and essential guide to the origins and evolution of the Hebrew language. While doing so, he also makes a convincing case that his subject matter should be of broad interest; Glinert notes that, while “no English speaker today could open a thousand-year-old ‘English’ text and make sense of it” without help, a contemporary Hebrew speaker could read a “three-thousand-year-old chapter of biblical prose and understand it almost unaided.” In detailed yet accessible prose, Glinert explains how that is possible, by tracing how the Hebrew language developed as a social organism. Hebrew was profoundly influenced by how it was used, from the writing of the Hebrew Bible, to its revival, in the 20th century, as a living language as part of the successful Zionist movement to return Jews to their homeland in Israel. The book’s comprehensive scope enables even lay readers to be amused—and edified—by the contrast between the language’s beginnings, with the lyrical language of Genesis, and its current state, with the invention of a Hebrew term for a dispenser for a bag to collect dog poop. This is a must-read for students of language and Jewish history. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2017 | Details & Permalink

Can a 50-something neophyte glean meaning about herself and the world from observing all 18 annual Jewish holidays in a year of personal exploration? Pogrebin (Stars of David) provides a vigorous and moving affirmative answer in this insightful, clever, funny, and compulsively readable volume that will lead newcomers to seek out her other writings. Having grown up with her Jewish identity “a given, not a pursuit,” Pogrebin believed that there was more to “feel than I’d felt, more to understand than I knew.” She is guided by an eclectic group of teachers, including rabbis from all modern denominations, who provide different lenses through which to view ancient, and sometimes obscure, holidays as relevant today. Her exploration begins with Elul, the Hebrew month that precedes the Jewish New Year, that provides an opportunity to gear up for that holy day with daily self-examinations; typically, her account of trying to learn how to blow a shofar every morning, and integrate her experiment in observance with her family routine, is both humorous and inspiring. Even knowledgeable Jews will find wisdom and new perspectives in these pages. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2017 | Details & Permalink

In this intriguing analysis, Candler School of Theology professor Strawn sounds an alarm, equating the Old Testament with a dying language the loss of which threatens devastating consequences for Christianity and humanity. Using linguistic investigations, Strawn describes both the “vicious disdain” for the Old Testament deity professed by biologist Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists, and the extreme “religious rhetoric” of television evangelist Pat Robertson as “pidgins”: “greatly abbreviated languages that facilitate the bare minimum of communication.” Arguing that the second-century heresies of Marcion, who found irreconcilable differences between the deities represented in the Old and New Testaments, have endured, Strawn suggests that the “pidginization reflected in Christian liturgy” led to the rise in German anti-Semitism and eventually the Holocaust. He argues that the Old Testament language was “reduced, then subsumed, then transformed, and... entirely forgotten” in the “creole” preached by prosperity gospel “happiologists” like Joel Osteen. Following these depressing analyses with “A Path to Recovery,” Strawn emphasizes the need to save dying languages and become bilingual, concluding that “the Old Testament must be used—extensively and regularly... in formative moments of Christian practice and education.” This engaging scholarly work deserves serious attention from today’s church leaders. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2017 | Details & Permalink

Wicker (Weightless) is blunt about the trials and joys of being a mother of faith. She describes her disappointment at discovering she’s pregnant with her fifth child, admits that both she and her children behave less than perfectly at times (or often), and explores the many ways theory smacks against reality when it comes to motherhood. Each chapter begins with a witty title (“Queen Mommy”), an “evil earworm” (“Being a mother is the most important thing a Catholic woman can do”), and an “unvarnished truth” (“Motherhood is actually not your highest calling. Being a daughter of God is”) that sets up the unrealistic “perfect” behavior she then goes about dismantling. For this small but considerable book, Wicker analyzes stages of motherhood, mothers’ competitions, mommies’ martyrdom, and the downside of Pinterest perfectionism; in the last chapter, she delves into clinical and postpartum depression. Along with thanking supportive friends, Wicker tells funny stories with love and humility and includes saints’ sayings and popes’ quotes. She also offers practical advice, a reading group guide, resources, and many prayers in this candid, helpful book. (Mar.)

Reviewed on 01/06/2017 | Details & Permalink