Cannonball Read 12

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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Nuns and Prostitutes

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

A Time to Scatter Stones by Lawrence Block

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I knocked out two quick books in the last day, neither of which won me over. Mariette in Ecstasy Judging by other reviews of this book, it appears as if I’m taking a rare middle ground stance. I thought the prose was beautiful and the scene descriptions lush and full. I enjoyed several individual pages. But with a big cast of characters and a central one the writer makes intentionally mysterious, none of it resonates. Plotting is marginal at best. It just lurches from one […]

A Quick Read with Transformative Power

Love Wins by Rob Bell

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“A staggering number of people have been taught that a select few Christians will spend forever in a peaceful, joyous place called heaven, while the rest of humanity spends forever in torment and punishment in hell with no chance for anything better. It’s been clearly communicated to many that this belief is a central truth of the Christian faith and to reject it is, in essence, to reject Jesus. This is misguided and toxic and ultimately subverts the contagious spread of Jesus’s message of love, […]

For all y’all hippie monks

New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

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This book has been on my shelf for years. Since we’ve been home more than a month and I have the spiritual space to sit down with this kind of dense nourishment, I finally took the plunge and fully engaged with Thomas Merton. He’s something of a legend to Christian contemplatives, sort of like the Keith Richards of monks. Wise, somewhat cantankerous, expansive and global in his conception of God, God’s purpose, and destiny of people. A hippie monk. In New Seeds of Contemplation, Merton […]

If you think things are bad now… try living 2000 years ago

Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas

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I’ve heard great things about Tsiolkas’ writing and even though two of his earlier books (The Slap and Barracuda) were very popular and both made into tv series, I still hadn’t gotten around to reading any of his writing. So, after hearing his interview on Conversations with Richard Fidler (best interviewer around!) about the process for writing his latest book, I decided then and there to read it. I’m happy to report it was a very good decision and I need to go back and […]

Some More Ontology, Just for Fun

The Courage To Be by Paul Tillich

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I’m by no means a philosophy expert! That being said, my hope is to become more conversant in the “love of wisdom” in order to live a better life. As mentioned in a previous post, I started reading theologian-philosopher Tillich because MLK read Tillich. MLK even critiqued him as a major part of his doctoral work.  I grabbed The Courage to Be, my second Tillich book, from the library just because it was what they happened to have on the shelf while I was browsing. […]



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