GOD IS NOT ONE by Stephen Prothero and MAN SEEKS GOD by Eric Weiner

Last year when Matt, the adult religious ed director at St. Mike's Catholic Church, asked the Wednesday morning class what they'd like to study next, the response was nearly unanimous - other religions.

St. Mike's is in Wheaton, Illinois, and Wheaton used to be called the evangelical Vatican (it now vies with Colorado Springs for that title). Wheaton is in DuPage County, which is roughly two-thirds Catholic. But the heavily Christian western suburbs of Chicago are changing. Today DuPage County, though still the home of hundreds of Christian churches, also has four Muslim mosques, six Hindu temples, an Arya Samaj center, a Buddhist temple, a Buddhist meditation center, two synagogues, and the headquarters of the Theosophical Society. These people are our neighbors, our coworkers, our children's classmates. No wonder we want to learn more about them.

Thanks to the class, I've gotten acquainted with Stephen Prothero's outstanding survey, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (2010). Prothero's thesis runs counter to the prevailing wisdom, at least in the West. No, he argues, the world's major religions are not all essentially the same. They do not all lead to the same place. They do not "make up one big, happy family." "This is a lovely sentiment," Prothero writes, "but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue." Intended to increase tolerance, such wishful thinking about other religions can actually lead to more terrorism, more war.

Prothero, who describes himself as "religiously confused," does not argue for the superiority of one religion over another. His aim is not to proselytize but to increase clarity and understanding. He does this by looking at how each religion answers the big questions: "Here we are in these human bodies. What now? What next? What are we to become?" "Each religion," he writes, articulates

a problem;

a solution to this problem, which also serves as the religious goal;

a technique (or techniques) for moving from this problem to this solution; and

an exemplar (or exemplars) who chart this path from problem to solution.

Choosing eight religions based on their numeric and historical importance, he then devotes separate chapters to each: Islam, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Yoruba religion, Judaism, and Daoism, with "a brief coda" on atheism. The chapters can be read in any order. Last night I delved into Confucianism, about which I know almost nothing. Oops--Prothero says it's been more influential than any other religion except Islam and Christianity. In 30 pages, he summarizes its history, its teachings, and its influence (especially in the West). He also made me laugh out loud more than once. Here is a teacher who can impart an amazing amount of information while holding my attention, not an easy task.

God Is Not One is a great introduction for people interested in other religions' history, teachings, and practices. If that's more than you want to know but you'd still like to find out how various religions might feel to a Western observer, try Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine (2011). It offers significantly less information, being almost entirely experience oriented; but it's fascinating and funny and might even inspire you to go on and read Prothero's book.

Eric Weiner (channeling Prothero?) describes himself as a "Confusionist" and does not accept "the politically correct belief that all religions are equally valid":

I find this extraordinary. Would we say that about anything else? Would we say that all forms of government, be it totalitarian or democracy, were equally true and good? Would we say that all corporations are equally true and good? Would we say that all toaster ovens are equally true and good? Yet when it comes to religion we jettison our powers of discernment. Saying all religions are equally true and good is like saying none are.

He does not argue in favor of the truer and better, however, because--as a health crisis dramatically showed him--he doesn't know who his God is. So he grabs a notebook and his passport and sets off to find God.

Interested mostly in religious experience, he spends time with touchy-feely subgroups of some of the world's major religions (and a few minor ones): Islam (Sufism) in Mendocino, CA, and Istanbul, Turkey; Buddhism in Kathmandu; Christianity (Franciscans) in the Bronx, NY; Raëlism (this would be the world's largest UFO-based religion) in Las Vegas, NV; Taoism in Wuhan, China; Wicca in Seattle, WA; Shamanism in Beltsville, MD; and--I'm guessing this is his personal favorite--Judaism (Kabbalah) in Tzfat, Israel.

The result is a crazy melange of personal memoir, travel writing, religion, and journalism--and it works. Weiner's previous book, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World (2008), made the New York Times bestseller list and collected a heap of awards. I wouldn't be surprised if Man Seeks God does the same.

The second-best book on the Sabbath

"The Sabbath, I said, is not only an idea. It is also something you keep. With other people." 

- Judith Shulevitz

If you read only one book about the Sabbath, it should be Abraham Joshua Heschel's 1951 classic. If you have time to read another one, I recommend a book that was published just last week: The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time by Judith Shulevitz. (If you don't have time to read either book, you need both of them more than you realize.)

I grew up keeping Sabbath. My parents were staunch Seventh-day Adventists, and every week by late Friday afternoon the house was clean, the next day's food was cooked, and baths were taken. Fridays were hell, but they ensured that for the next 24 hours we would have a total respite from paid work, house work, yard work, and school work. As a basically lazy person whose responsible behavior was motivated by guilt, I appreciated the weekly shift : every Sabbath, guilt attached itself not to sloth but to work.

In the three decades since I left the Adventist church, I have read a variety of Protestant books about the Sabbath. Most refer to the Jewish Sabbath, offer some wisdom about the Western enslavement to work, and suggest taking time off for worship and restoration : weekly, if possible (Tuesdays would be fine), less often if necessary, and don't forget the annual vacation. Good counsel, to be sure - but from authors who do not understand Sabbath because they have never really lived it.

Judith Shulevitz understands Sabbath.

My friend the orthodox rabbi might disagree, since he has kept Sabbath faithfully for over 60 years while Shulevitz keeps "the Sabbath, but only halfway - by strict Jewish standards, at least - which sometimes feels fine and sometimes feels shameful but has come to feel inevitable.... Probably the only way for me to trick myself into being shomer Shabbat," she writes, "would be to restrict myself to circles where such behavior is the norm, not subject to constant question."

Shulevitz's disclaimer is one reason I find her understanding of Sabbath so much deeper than that of most contemporary Protestants (though not than that of the observant rabbi) : she knows you can't keep a real Sabbath on your own. Sabbath is a community affair, and no amount of individual days off can replicate it, even if you spend part of your Sabbath time in church.

Not only is Sabbath impossible without community, but community is much harder to create without Sabbath. "People who study the ways in which cultures evolve might say that the Sabbath gives societies a competitive advantage. It promotes social solidarity," Shulevitz writes. It does this by limiting work time in order to allow time for social bonding, by giving everyone the same day off so they can do things together, by insisting that this day be observed every week so that it becomes a habit, and by making the day festive, "filled with song, wine, food, and pretty clothes."

Adventists didn't get the memo about wine, but the SDA enclaves of my youth excelled in the other three categories, plus nature walks and games involving Bible verses. A festive day it was and still is, according to frequent Friday-afternoon status updates by my still-SDA Facebook friends. Now tired, overworked, fragmented adults, many of them can't wait for the sun to go down so that Sabbath can begin.

They may be as interested as I was by Shulevitz's brief but accurate history of the Christian Sabbath. Her handling of the Sabbath-to-Sunday switch is essentially what I learned from Seventh-day Adventist seminary professors, and Adventists may see traces of their own heritage in her comments on Sabbath and Bible reading, the Puritan Sabbath, the Transylvanian Sabbath (who knew?) and religious liberty, and the evangelical and romantic Sabbaths of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Shulevitz, who has written for Slate, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and The New Republic, calls this book spiritual autobiography, but she focuses much more on Sabbath than on herself. She may begin a paragraph with "Sometimes I think that drinking wine is the only form of religiosity I can consistently muster," but before the next indent she will mention Elliott Horowitz, a contemporary social historian; the first-century biographer Plutarch; a 17th-century rabbi from Frankfurt; Passover rituals; and the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Sometimes her erudition is dizzying, but it is never heavy-handed. "Wine," the paragraph concludes, "is the Sabbath in a bottle."

The book is already attracting a lot of media attention. For example, read Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's highly personal review/response, "On the Seventh Day," in the New York Times Sunday Book Review (March 25), or listen to Terry Gross's interview of Shulevitz on NPR's Fresh Air (March 31). If you're reading this today, April 1, a real treat is in store for you : Shulevitz will be tonight's guest of honor on  The Colbert Report (no foolin').

Review: Good in and out of bed

A few months ago when I reviewed Sarah Dunn's Secrets to Happiness, my daughter Heidi told me I'd also enjoy Jennifer Weiner's books. I usually take Heidi's advice on just about everything, but for some reason I didn't rush right out to get Weiner's first chick-lit best-seller, Good in Bed. Something about the title made me think maybe I'd need my mother's permission to read it.

(Before reading another word, note that the author's name is pronounced WYE-ner, rhymes with finer. Forget the wisecrack you were about to make.)

A couple of weeks ago, though, I went to the library in pursuit of comic novels to take along on a week's vacation. With no particular authors or titles in mind, I wandered through the new-book shelves and the paperback racks, and the more books I looked at, the worse I felt. Some of the books were similar to the New Yorker short story genre Weiner once described in an interview as "stories [that] seem to end with someone staring off at the white walls of a white room, and you think that something's happened but you're not quite sure what." Most had actual topics, but I didn't really want to delve into depression and dysfunction and people hurting people, at least not while relaxing in a cabin by the lake.

Suddenly Good in Bed sounded quite promising. Alas, it was already checked out, so I settled for its sequel, Certain Girls. I loved it.

The underlying conflict is between a 42-year-old mother, Cannie, and her 13-year-old daughter, Joy. Joy would like to be popular with the mean girls but does not want to alienate her nerdy friends. She wants a themed bat mitzvah party and a designer dress. Above all, she wants to distance herself from her mother, about whom she hates everything--especially after reading her mother's semi-autobiographical novel, including the X-rated parts.

Weiner dexterously alternates between Joy's viewpoint and Cannie's, seasoning the mother-daughter tension with great dollops of laugh-out-loud humor. For the first four-fifths of the book I'm thinking this is exactly the comic novel I've been looking for--and then something bad happens. Just like in life.

No spoilers in this review. I'll just say that Weiner can't help being funny and hopeful, and this book is not a downer. I liked it even better than the prequel, Good in Bed, which I read as as soon as it came back to the library.

Good in Bed lays the foundation for everything that happens in Certain Girls, and sensible people will read it first. The story takes place some 14 years earlier, when Cannie is in her late twenties and heartbroken, having just broken up with a man who is obviously (to all her friends and family) not a good bet for a long-term relationship. With all the humor of the sequel plus an improbable but delightful fairy godmother (in the form of a young, hard-drinking, big-spending movie star), this book also takes a sudden turn toward tragedy right near the end. It has to, I think, or Cannie would get permanently stuck, psychologically speaking.

Why are Weiner's books--bestsellers all--so popular? Well, she's incredibly funny. She's also intelligent--graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, for example. She connects well with readers on a personal level (if you want to be a fan, check out her blog). She tells a good story; she can be tender but is never saccharine; and her characters--despite distress and disaster--muddle through, hopefully and hilariously.

Oh, and one other thing: Cannie is a woman of size. Size 16, to be precise, and 5'10" tall--kind of like Weiner herself. Cannie's weight is not the focus of the stories, but her concern about it, and the way it makes her feel, keeps cropping up. In the "conversation" at the back of Good In Bed Weiner says, "I'd never read a book that really expressed the reality of what it's like to live in a larger-than-average body.... I wanted to encompass the unhappiness of living in a plus-size body, but also show that it's not pure, unadulterated, 200-proof misery. I wanted to show the whole scope of things--professional success, rewarding friendships, a loving, if vexing, family, a weird little dog, great meals, great adventures, and love, and self-acceptance at the end."

You don't have to look just like Cannie to have an idea of how she feels. I'm not heavy, but I'm uncommonly tall and a bit ungainly (I love Julia Child), and I have seen my reflection in a restroom mirror as I washed my hands next to 5'4" sylphlike friends, feeling like a giraffe among the gazelles. What woman has not had a similar experience, whatever her age or height or weight or disability or hair shortcomings? And what is it with us and our bodies? Why is it so hard to accept variety in the way we're packaged?

"My ideal reader," Weiner says, "is any woman who's ever felt like she needed to get undressed in the dark, any woman who's ever felt miserable about the size of her hips or the shape of her face or the texture of her hair... which is to say, lamentably, every single woman in America, and probably beyond, judging from the reception Good in Bed has gotten abroad."

Cannie, at age 28 and also at age 42, is a big woman who is doing just fine.

Challah on Wednesday

Challah is the traditional Jewish Sabbath bread eaten with the Friday evening meal. Back in 1973, when we lived down the street from an excellent Jewish bakery, we started buying challah every week. Mr Neff passed for Jewish (little did he know, back then, that he wasn't just passing) until one Friday afternoon when our neighbor Arthur J. Balderman saw him across the bakery and hollered, "Happy Sabbath, Reverend!"

To do it right, you need two loaves and a challah cover and candles and prayers in Hebrew. Gefilte fish is nice too. We never did it right. We just enjoyed the bread along with cheese and fruit and grape juice. It became our Friday night tradition. So in 1975, when we moved far from our bakery, I had to learn to bake challah.

Here are the proportions I use. You can do this by hand, in a food processor, or in a big old mixing machine. You can even mix it in a bread machine, but you'll have to shape the dough by hand.

For one big loaf
3.5 C (=1 lb) bread (or all-purpose) flour
4 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1.5 tsp yeast
1/4 C butter or vegetable oil [Note: If you will serve your challah at a meal where meat will be eaten, do not use butter. At least not if you want to be Jewish.]
2 eggs plus most of the 3rd egg--leave out about half the yolk for glazing
3/4 C hot tap water

Etc., etc. Mix, knead, let rise, shape, let rise, bake at 400 for about 25 minutes or at 350 for about 45 minutes or whatever.

To shape the loaf, divide dough into three balls and roll out into three long strands. Starting at the middle, braid out to each end. Tuck ends under and seal. Just before baking, lightly brush top with the reserved egg yolk which has been diluted with about a teaspoon of cold water. If you like, sprinkle with sesame or poppy seeds.

Alternately, divide the dough in half. One "half" is always larger than the other, right? Don't try to fix it. Take the larger portion, divide in three, and braid as above, except don't seal the ends. Then take the smaller portion, divide in three, braid, and plop the braid on top of the larger braid. Seal all the ends together. This produces a beautiful loaf (see the picture for how it should look), unless the top braid slides to one side, in which case it still tastes good.

You can make two loaves from this recipe, but they'll be pretty small. If you do that, shorten the cooking time by 5 or 10 minutes. Or you can increase the proportions. Try 5 C flour, 2 T sugar, 1.5 t salt, 1 pkg (2.5 t) yeast, 1/3 C oil, 1 C hot water, 4 eggs.

Tonight we attended the last Lenten Loaf and Ladle supper at St Barnabas. I brought challah--inappropriate for Wednesday, but everyone liked it--and whole wheat bread. Matt Rodman brought apple and brie soup, the Swansons contributed cream of tomato--an old family recipe that has nothing whatsoever in common with Campbell's--and the Pelches brought Italian wedding soup. Mr Neff, who tried all three, reports that all were excellent.

Resurrection, body and soul

Four months ago I mentioned a pre-publication review of Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews by Kevin J. Madigan and Jon D. Levenson. Since then our rabbi gave Mr Neff a copy of the book, which I've now read. It's a fine study of the resurrection of the body, particularly in the Hebrew Bible and subsequent rabbinic teachings.

Here are a couple of gems about the unity of the person, as taught in the early centuries of the common era:

Whatever notions of the soul circulated in ancient Judaism, in rabbinic theology God was not thought to have fulfilled his promises until the whole person returned, body included. Like death, a disembodied existence was deemed to be other than the last word, for the person is not 'the ghost in the machine' (that is, the body) but rather a unity of body and soul. (204)

Both Tertullian and Irenaeus go to some pains to argue against a view of salvation that is understood strictly in terms of the survival or salvation of the soul.... As the orthodox saw it, the texture of humanity was a seamless, indivisible work of art, composed of flesh and soul--very much like the view of the rabbis we examined in the previous chapter. God will reward the blessed, body and soul. . . . Only if the whole person, both elements of which were created by God, were raised could humanity be redeemed and justice achieved. (233)

And here's a thought-provoking observation about why so many contemporary people do not believe in a literal resurrection of the body:

The major change has been widespread skepticism about the one who performs the expected resurrection--the personal, supernatural God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who intervenes in the course of human and natural events and brings about results that are otherwise impossible. The tendency among many modern people ... has been either to doubt all claims of the existence of God or to redefine God so that the word refers to human ideals and feelings alone and not to the source of miraculous acts and providential guidance. In short, in the modern world, the idea of a God who does things has become highly problematic. And whatever else one may say about a God who does not do anything, one thing is sure: he does not resurrect the dead. (215)

Creators of the flesh

Though I am not Jewish, I have a wonderful rabbi. Here's what he tells me about praying for the sick:

Whenever we pray for a sick person we say, "May God who blessed Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, bless and heal _____, the [son or daughter] of ______." The last blank is not the father. The sick person is always referred to as the son or daughter of the mother. We invoke the mother's name. This is based on Jeremiah 31:14-19.

[Check it out: it's the passage on Rachel weeping for her children.]

And so the rabbis remark on this passage that in the end of days when it comes time to redeem Israel, God will not listen to the pleas of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses. Rather, what moves God most is the plea of Mother Rachel. This is based on the simple Jewish notion that what women and God share in common is the very custodianship of the sanctity of human flesh. Both are creators of the flesh. Men by definition are not. For that reason we pray for sick people in the name of their mother.

In case you're wondering, my rabbi is not worried about being politically correct: he's Orthodox.

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