As to what I’m reading this summer, it’s an odd mishmash but here is what is on the headboard these days:
– Paul Stamets’ Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms (Ten Speed, 2000): the definitive manual for cultivating mushrooms with an eye toward restoring the health of the world and “achieving ecological balance through the use of fungi” which I am reading in order to improve my Shiitake mushroom logs as well as to branch out into other mushrooms on our farm both for consumption (Oyster, Turkey Tail) and for remediation/prevention of runoff, etc. (King Stropharia).
– Étienne Gilson’s The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard (Cistercian, 1990 [1940]): I kept coming across Gilson in Merton, Leclercq, Boylan, et al., and am finally getting around to reading some of his work (in translation).
– Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture (Paraclete, 2010): the latest (third) book by Wilson-Hartgrove a local Baptist whose Schools for Conversion/neo-monastic movement is responding to a need among [evangelical Protestant] Christians to recover a fuller sense of the Christian life through the wisdom of the monastic tradition. This book is based on the lived example of living in Rutba House, a residential Christian community in inner city Durham, NC. I first met Jonathan when he was giving a reflection on “eating together” at a conference “Land-Bread-Body” sponsored by Duke’s program for rural Methodist communities (that included Norman Wirzba as a keynote speaker and a permaculture expert doing hands on demonstrations in the community garden) and was immediately thrilled to find someone who shares many of my passions.
– and of course dozens of board-books for our 14-month old daughter of which Jesus and the Twelve Dudes Who Did, telling the story of each of the apostles as their faces stick out into the page, might be of interest to the Pray Tell readership.
Please leave a reply.