Grounded

Cassie likes to buy me books. Almost every Christmas I find a recently published hardcover underneath the tree, handpicked and waiting for my viewing eyes. Cassie is more well connected and has a better understanding of what is being published and talked about due to her social media endeavors, so maybe tweets and facebook are not as worthless as I once thought, but I am still not signing up for facebook. However, for some reason, when I unwrapped the newest work by Diana Butler Bass, Grounded: Finding God in the World – A Spiritual Revolution, on the 25th I was not excited or even a little curious to read the text I held in my hands. So for over a month the book sat there on the shelf collecting a great amount of dust here in Nicaragua.

 

Finally in February I decided that I at least needed to read the first chapter. After reading I was finished and convinced. I reported to Cassie that I had started and that I thought we should read the text together, so we began. Now, in April I find myself recommending Grounded to a whole host of individuals who are, or are not asking me for a reading recommendation. For that reason, I now find myself writing this blogpost in order to do the same to you the reader. I want to implore you, to give you a taste of this coffee stained, dog-eared, highlighted, written-in text that I hold in my hands, with the hopes that you too, may pick up the text and feel the motivation, joy and sorrow found within its pages.

Butler is filled with clarity as she surveys the global religious scene.

And if you still are not convinced here are some other thoughts about the text:

“Grounded is a wise and beautiful book. It is, in fact and in places, almost an anthem to the sacred unity of the physical and the spiritual in the formation of human faith and in the maturation of the human soul. To sink into its pages is to come home again, however briefly, to the sure knowledge of what is.”  -Phyllis Tickle

“Diana Butler Bass’s thoughtful mandate amounts not so much to a dismissal of the church, but a summons to renewal that can be both faithful and contemporary. Her accent champions a connectedness to the actual context in which we live”  -Walter Brueggemann

“It is so delightful to endorse a book that says what you want to say—but then says it so much better! The reversing of engines that Diana Butler Bass describes in Grounded was first announced by Jesus himself, of course. How strange that it should seem so new and even revolutionary two thousand years later.”  -Richard Rohr