“Getting Religion” by Kenneth L. Woodward, Convergent, 464 pages, $30
It’s become clear, after digesting dozens of titles from the “spiritual” bookshelf, that the shortest route to stirring the soul is readability. More and more, great writing and great storytelling are requisites for delivering a live jolt to the heart and the soul. Kenneth L. Woodward, a first-rate journalist for seven decades, more than delivers.
As the religion editor at Newsweek magazine from 1964 until his retirement in 2002, and a contributing editor until 2009, Woodward writes that he “had the good fortune (or not) of living through the most volatile religious period in American history.”
In his latest book, “Getting Religion: Faith, Culture, and Politics From the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama,” he weaves memoir, reporting and sharp-edged analysis through his half-century on the religion front. Along the way he puts his pen and literary portraiture to preachers, protesters and politicians — and everything in between — including Billy Graham, Hillary Clinton, Sun Myung Moon, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Daniel Berrigan, Mario Cuomo, Richard John Neuhaus, Werner Erhard and even his longtime friend the Dalai Lama.
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His narrative threads through the revolutions of post-Vatican II, the civil rights era, the anti-Vietnam War movement, Latin American liberation theology, the rise of evangelism and decline of mainline Protestantism, women’s liberation and the curious embrace of righteous politics by both the Republican and Democratic parties.
As John L. Allen Jr., editor of Crux, puts it: “No American journalist has patrolled the borders of that often-troubled relationship between faith and culture longer or better than Ken Woodward.”
Nor has any writer, with a deep well of religious literacy, ever made the latter half of the 20th century so captivatingly readable. You’ll laugh. You’ll wince. You’ll mark the book a keeper.
“My Life With the Saints” by James Martin, S.J., Loyola, 414 pages, $15.95
It’s considered a “modern spiritual classic,” and with great reason: James Martin — a glorious storyteller who happens to be a Jesuit priest, editor-at-large of America, the national Catholic review, and a prolific author — becomes from Chapter 1 (“The Saint of the Sock Drawer”) something of a trusted friend who’s neither afraid to laugh at himself nor to bare his soul’s most intimate whisperings.
Before you know it you’re swept under his writerly wing, and riding along on his mystery tour of saints he wants you to know — and befriend. And through some transitive literary property, it works. Even if you’ve not considered yourself a student of the saints, you just might find yourself enchanted by the humility of Therese of Lisieux, the many contradictions of Thomas Merton, the devotion to the poor of Dorothy Day.
Don’t be surprised if, at moments, you feel as if you’re perched on a bar stool beside a great raconteur, or sidled into a pew at the back of a church and the wiseguy sitting next to you has you in stitches. No wonder “My Life With the Saints” was widely embraced when first released in 2006. This 10th anniversary edition includes a new epilogue, and a foreword from John L. Allen, Jr., who calls Martin’s work “the most human, honest, warm, and even humorous treatment of the saints that I have ever encountered.”
While progressive Catholics and Protestants, especially, might be put off by the study of saints, Martin makes clear why it matters: “They teach me about being who I am. Each of the saints has been, to quote John XXIII, ‘holy in a different way.'” And those are lessons worth learning.
“The Beautiful Not Yet” by Carrie Newcomer, Available Light, 108 pages, $11.99
Carrie Newcomer, a singer, songwriter, poet and essayist (among other callings), has been dubbed a “prairie mystic,” and Rolling Stone wrote that “she asks all the right questions.” Parker Palmer, a great spiritualist, calls her “an alchemist,” and he likens her gifts to those of Thomas Merton and his capacity to see “the hidden wholeness,” the beauty of the everyday “beyond life’s broken facades.”
Newcomer’s work — poems, essays, lyrics — is bursting with the beautiful, the sacred holiness of the quotidian. Her latest collection, “The Beautiful Not Yet” (and its companion CD of the same title), pulses with prayerfulness.
Consider her poem “A Shovel Is a Prayer,” in which she writes: “A shovel is a prayer to the farmer’s foot,/ When she steps down and the soft earth gives way./ … A friend is a prayer when they ask the right question,/ When they bring over soup …”
Or these lines from “Miracles”: “There are so many of them,/ I start to lose count./ There are too many to hold in my two hands./ So I just keep dropping them like acorns/ Into a basket hiked up on my hip./ The revelation of light, filtered through rain,/ A sky so pregnant it weeps with the joy of it./ The circular wonder/ Of a big bite of darkness/ That keeps chasing and catching/ And releasing the moon.”
She plies her magic with words and music. She’s a spiritualist poet in communion with Mary Oliver, Jane Hirshfield and Wendell Berry. And that is holy communion, indeed.
Barbara Mahany is the author of “Slowing Time: Seeing the Sacred Outside Your Kitchen Door”; her next book, “Motherprayer: Lessons in Loving,” is due out in early 2017.