Miller is an obvious poet. With evocative images and deeply personal insight, he maps his spiritual journey, as he says, in a non-religious voice. It is a refreshing mix. He speaks with all the honesty of a disenfranchized and disappointed fundamentalist, tired of the rhetoric of love empty of substance.

 

Some will be disturbed at his seeming lack of "Christian" presentation. He neglects all the hyper-spiritual sounding language that accompanies much of our church culture. At the same time, he relates honestly his struggles with such life issues as dating, finance, acceptance, sharing his faith and a multitude of other interwoven ideas.

 

Central to his thinking is the mystery of the faith. He speaks with profound reverence of how big God is and how Jesus reaches into his life to change him, sometimes painfully, sometimes quickly, but always radically and deeply.

 

Our own walks should be so honest. A walk that walks away from teaching a youth sunday school class because the facade that accompanies the position becomes too engrossing. A walk that prefers the company of agnostics and atheists to many churches because they are more welcoming and accepting. One can only weep when he describes how a man who speaks like Elmer Fudd is better off on a secular and radically hedonistic college campus, because there he will not be judged and laughed at as he would in even the most sensitive churches.

 

Blue Like Jazz may not present a picture that makes you comfortable. It may invite you to step away from your church culture for the chance to be an authentic (I know ... a buzz word) believer in a world that screams for authenticity. His Pacific Northwest culture may not transfer easily into your life, but the challenge is to be where you are and who you are around the people that God loves. And at the same time, to embrace the idea that you are among those people.

 

You may be offended by the idea that a Christian can drink beer and smoke a pipe, or object to Republican politics, but in the end, what is more clear, important, and central to the gospel - a tee totaler's discipline (and that may be very important for you, even vitally important), or learning to be loved and to love the way Jesus does?

 

PT

An excellent read. Of course, anyone who knows me knows that I like anything that has to do with the manned space program. Apollo 11 is the mother of all space missions. However, even aside from that, Collins writes an excellent story, though longer than one would expect. He takes the reader through his entire career as an astronaut including his stint on Gemini 10. The Gemini program is the stepchild of the space program, and little is said of the great accomplishments. It is refreshing to hear them from such an easy to read perspective.

 

Collins begins by saying that it is his purpose to avoid telling a boring story because he doesn't like reading boring stories. True to purpose, he tells a tale that is as full of adventure, insecurity, frustration, and optimism as life itself. He is positive throughout, though he does not try to make a jerk seem like an angel.

 

His perspective, the guy left in the car while Neil and Buzz walked on the moon still shows a man fully happy in the knowledge that he is playing a vital role in an historic event. Also, the sense of quiet and freedom he expresses from the far side of the moon, all alone, is quite inspiring.

 

His conclusions have all the earmarks of his friend who described him as Prometheus. He is the hero who has taken a challenging and unique journey and has not only lived to tell about it, but has come back bigger and humbler than he was when he left. He gives compassionate and insightful perspective on his comrades in space, offering an insiders view.

 

I highly recommend Carrying the Fire. It is fresh in that it is human and witty. It is profound in that it seeks to interpret the space program from that same stance.

The Great Conversation by Robert M. Hutchins

This book is Volume 1 in the Great Books of the Western World (in 54 volumes). In it the author offers several specific items related to the series and one longer treatise. It is the treatise that I recently read.

 

Hutchins writes forcefully and persuasively about the value of a "liberal education." Liberal should not be understood in the political sense, but rather in the sense of generosity. A Liberal education is one that looks to diverse places for substance. In this case, he advocates, what he asserts was the basis of a liberal education until modern times, the Great Books.

 

Of course, he is motivating buyers of the Great Books of the Western World in the value of reading their purchase, but he makes poignant points:

These points, valid or not, are gas for our mental engines. How many of us have disciplined ourselves to continue educating ourselves after school is past? Can we expect our entire intellectual lives to be fed by the education we received in the first 25 years of our lives?

 

Hutchins argues that the Great Books were originally written for the masses. Our protests that we cannot grasp them are more an indictment upon ourselves than a reflection of their actual difficulty. He also observes that the generalist may be more well equipped to cope with the material in the Great Books than the specialist, being uninhibited and unbiased in his or her approach.

 

Whether a person feels the need to indulge in the wealth of the greatest writing the western world has produced, it does us well to reflect on how we use the leisure our free society has given us. A 40 hour work week should be good for something besides making us the targets of the American marketing machine. It should afford us the opportunity to make our own inner lives and the world better than we found it.