[I’ve got some
very talented friends and colleagues. So for this
year’s annual Beach Reads series, I wanted to highlight works by friends
old and new and colleagues at FSU (I’m a poet and I don’t know it!). Leading up
to one of my favorite crowd-sourced posts of the year, so make sure to share
your Beach Read nominations, please!]
Like yesterday’s
subject Emily Page, Lauren Winner and I were in the Charlottesville public
schools together—but she was a year ahead of me and I didn’t know her nearly as
well. But I could tell she was headed for big things, and I wasn’t wrong—Lauren
is now an Associate
Professor of Christian Spirituality at Duke University Divinity School, and
has become one of our most prominent and thoughtful voices on all things
religion in 21st century American society. Her personal and public
scholarly writing for sites such as Beliefnet
and Christianity
Today was an early model for my own forays into public scholarship, and
her
books likewise blend memoir, public scholarship, and theological
philosophy. From what I can tell you can’t go wrong with any of those books,
but a particularly good fit for a Beach Read would be her first, Girl
Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life (2002). A memoir of her
conversion from Judaism to Christianity, Girl
is also a nuanced examination of spirituality and identity in our fraught and
fractured 21st century world. And it’s pretty darn funny at the same
time, which is key for any good Beach Read and certainly one that deals with
such weighty topics.
Next Beach Read
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What are you
bringing to the beach this year or would you recommend we bring?
No comments:
Post a Comment