|
|
|
|
|
|
HomeShop at BookSurgeReligionBibleStudyOld TestamentMindful |
|
|  |
| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 2 customer reviews )
Write an online review and share your thoughts with other customers.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
A highly engaging and readable study Jun 07, 2009
By Leslie D. Ross
Barbara Green's Mindful is not only a most engaging read but also represents a truly remarkable work of scholarship that brings ancient biblical history and current modes of textual anaylsis to modern readers in a format that maintains and inspires great interest. Readers will find that the characters and situations she presents in her book continue to resonate boldly. Readers are inspired and encouraged to ask and to see how ancient stories are shaped and crafted and re-crafted. Far from an "historical novel" based in biblical times, this work represents a most astute example of current scholarship based on the author's own expertise in not only bilical studies but text analysis. An excellent and engaging read!
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
Thoughtful of the past Mar 31, 2009
By Millelle
"Yours is the challenge to make our past urgently present and our present deeply drawn in the past, so that nothing is lost."
On the surface Mindful is the story of a journey: it's 535 B.C.E. and about forty people are returning from the Babylonian Captivity to Jerusalem. It is fascinating to see how the group lives and manages such a trek - the American pioneers crossing the heart of the continent must have had it easy by comparison - not only in terms of daily life but more importantly, in terms of how they deal with their past, with their traditions, somewhat in abeyance during the years in Babylon, that they will be looking to as they start life in anew in Judah. There to assist them with this challenge is Tizkor, who has a remarkable gift: she can enter what she calls the Caves of Memory. This wonderful image suggests a vast and mysterious storehouse of stories and songs, phrases and poems that her remote forebears had spoken. It's not clear to Tizkor precisely how this old and deep knowing of the Caves works. Her challenge is to not only find there what will be useful to a particular situation, but also to share it with the group, and to encourage them to regard it, reshape it, reinterpret it for their present circumstances. Sometimes in the process she learns a new story which can be added to the Caves; and the reshapings are clearly stored there as well. It is dynamic. To the 21st century reader, what we are seeing is the Bible before it became the Bible; how it might have developed in oral tradition, and how a mostly illiterate people would have accessed the material and ultimately shaped it into what we have today.
A crisis of sorts occurs when the possibility of writing things down emerges. This has not been an issue to date as hardly anyone can read. But this is starting to change. Tizkor initially resists, championing the fluidity and flexibility of the material as she finds it in the Caves. Those who do not have her gift, but could learn to read, press for a clear version, accessible to all. To those of us accustomed to the Bible as a book hundreds of years old, and easily available to most people, this is an astonishing argument!
These considerations of the use, power, vitality and importance of the past are the heart of the book. And the reader is invited to enter into the process as well. We are reminded that this exact sort of engagement with the wisdom of the past is available and necessary to us today.
But there's a good story here as well, and many engaging characters for whom we come to care in the course of the book. An enjoyable and thought-provoking read.
|
| | |
|
|
|
|
|
