SEE YOU IN APRIL

I am taking a Sabbatical until the first of April.
Clearing space
Reading
Resting
Healthing
Traveling
Studying
Following my nose

Will miss you

HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT PHYLLIS TICKLE?

I have the awful feeling that the more I tell you about her the less you might want to read her.  I'm sorry I discovered her right after she died. She was quite pragmatic and funny about her sudden diagnosis of lung cancer at 83 years of age.

Anyway, she was the religion editor for Publisher's Weekly and had a both very modern and very historical perspective on religion especially Christianity. Emergent Christianity is one of her better known books. She says that Christianity has a garage sale every five hundred years to get rid of things that are only clutter.  I loved her memoir The Shaping of a Life that tells her story of developing faith and it is all so nicely matter of fact from a near death experience to her sacred space in the women's bathroom in college.  Trust me
read her.

Here is what 'tickles' (couldn't resist) me about her writing and how it pertains to my book I Pray Anyway.  

For Tickle, the most interesting cohort in the Pew survey is not the usual “spiritual but not religious,” but the “neither spiritual nor religious” who get “lost in the shuffle” but are in fact the key to the future of faith.

“There is an honesty in their conversation and self-understanding that, it seems to me, makes them much more open to conversation and analysis and perhaps, ultimately, to persuasion than is true for other groups,” she writes in a follow-up email. “I may be wrong, but I am, as I say, fascinated.”

I am  fascinated too.  Read her.