A few years ago, after returning to corporate life and its associated business travel following seven ever-to-be-cherished years at home raising our daughter, I quickly began to find myself becoming… perhaps the best description would be disconnected. The hustle and bustle of the daily business world, and the particularly untethering frequent trips – largely by […]
Mark Avery and I have now both reviewed James Canton’s “The Papers,” each approaching it from our own different perspectives. That’s the beauty of reviewing books – different reviewers, bringing a diverse range of knowledge and experiences to the books they review, can easily interpret the same book in different ways yet still agree it is worth recommending.
Published in 2019 by Fordham University Press, this book caught my attention for it’s remarkably daring central proposition, that “[r]eligion in general, and Christianity in particular, appears to bear a disproportionate burden for creating humankind’s exploitative attitudes toward nature through unearthly theologies that divorce human beings and their spiritual yearnings from their natural origins. […] And yet, buried deep within the Christian tradition are startling portrayals of God as the beaked and feathered Holy Spirit – the ‘animal God,’ as it were, of historic Christian witness.”
I think it was the same day I opened the package containing a bright, fresh copy of Strachan Donnelley’s new posthumously published “Frog Pond Philosophy; Essays on the Relationship Between Humans and Nature” that I also received the news that Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin had proposed cutting all funding to the University of Kentucky Press that published it.