Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice. As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan. I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet. After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview . So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not. Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot. These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
Steven,
ReplyDeleteIt seems fairly straightforward to me. Religion and religious institutions get in the way of a relationship between the individual and the godhead.
Dear Fred,
ReplyDeleteWhile I may not agree, your point is perfectly clear to me. And therefore I could understand someone preferring God to institutional religion or religion of any sort. What I can't understand is how one would prefer religion (of any sort) to God. That is opaque.
Your point I not only get, but often feel twinges of. If religions could only be purged of their human element, I sometimes say. But I look at it and say, let me see--the Spanish inquisition or God? Hmm... Seems to me to be a no-brainer. As I said, as a practicing member of religion, I'm often tempted to toss the whole mess to one side and go it alone. But what I know is the folly of that, is that I won't "go" anything under those circumstances. So religion as community of helpers, again I get. But. . . well, as I said, completely opaque.
I think I've come to the conclusion that the commentary uses the word "religion" in a manner quite different from the way I use the same word. I think perhaps it is perhaps meaning a kind of spirituality or spiritual experience--which I view as quite a different thing as religion. But I am more than likely mistaken, and have already said too much.
shalom,
Steven
Steven,
ReplyDeleteI have slowly and reluctantly come to the conclusion that there is no simple right answer to many of these questions. We live in a grey world where black-and-white distinctions are seldom found.