What I Just Read

In Reaching Out , author and theologian Henri Nouwen describes three "movements"--movements in the sense of psychological growth: the first movement is from loneliness to solitude, the second is from hostility to hospitality, and the third is from illusion (the illusion that we are masters of our fate) to prayer. The author uses this movement paradigm to illustrate certain paradoxes that happen in our social life, our communal life and our spiritual life (all of which of course overlap): in order to be open you first have to be closed, in order to genuinely share yourself you have to have enough solitude--even loneliness--to know yourself. And in order to navigate modernity, you have to set aside any illusions, delusions or arrogances you might have about it, or yourself. There are interesting parallels here between this work and  the Life of Saint Columba , who had to make his own rather difficult journey from "hostility to hospitality" over the course of his life....

A beautiful book about a beautiful people. Anyone tempted by the idea of escaping "civilized" society will be fascinated by the Rom people, as they get to pick and choose from the trappings of modernity in ways the rest of us simply cannot. The author, a Belgian, left his own society when he was just twelve and lived with a Rom clan for some ten years--astoundingly, with his parents' consent! This book is one of the rare first person accounts of a notoriously misunderstood culture. [A quick  affiliate link to Amazon  for those readers who would like to support my work here: if you purchase your Amazon products via any affiliate link from this site, or from my sister site  Casual Kitchen , I will receive a small affiliate commission at no extra cost to you. Thank you!] The Gypsies [1]  live by their wits, by their remarkable resourcefulness, by barter, and at times by petty theft. What they don't do is sit in traffic to drive to a job filing TPS reports all...