Understanding Santeria through Stories

August 30, 2010 By David Charles 10 Comments

{Ocha’ni Lele. Teachings of the Santeria Gods. Destiny Books 2010. 269 pages. $16.95}

Reviewed by Star Foster

I love a good story. A good story has a mystery, a moral, a familiarity or a sense of the fantastic. A good story satisfies you down to your bones. Ocha’ni Lele’s book Teachings of the Santeria Gods is chock-full of just such stories.

Today when we want to learn about the Gods we often go to books that explain the Gods to us, rather than simply absorb the stories about the Gods. I knew very little about the orishas when I began reading Lele’s book but I was quickly entranced by them through their stories. What a wonderful way to meet Shango, Oya and Eleggua!

The book is divided into twelve sections to correspond with diloggun, an Afro-Caribbean divination system. For each of twelve possible results, or odu, there is a theme, and for that theme there are stories. Stories of love, loss, deception, faith, humility, perseverance, spiritual growth and sacrifice.

Sacrifice. If you know nothing else about Santeria you know they practice sacrifice devoutly but you may not know why. How does this fit in with their worldview? What function does it perform for them? How do they decide when and how and what to sacrifice? [Read more...]

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Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams: Saying Alleluia, Despite Life’s Challenges

August 3, 2010 By David Charles 70 Comments

{Joan Chittister and Rowan Williams. Uncommon Gratitude: Alleluia for All That Is. Liturgical Press 2010. 192 pages. $16.95}

Reviewed by Elizabeth Nordquist

Here are two leaders of the Christian Church — prominent and outspoken, thoughtful and spiritual — engaged in reflection on a practice that is common to almost every faith tradition, that of gratitude, or praise of the Holy, or as the two of them describe it, “It is the arch-hymn of praise, the ultimate expression of thanksgiving, the pinnacle of triumph, the acme of human joy, It says that God is good — and we know it” (ix).

I am acutely aware that both of these writers, Rowan Williams as Archbishop of Canterbury in the Anglican Communion, and Sr. Joan Chittister in the Benedictine order in the Roman Catholic Church, live, move, and minister in the throes of great conflict and upheaval in their world-wide communities in this present moment. However, when asked to write an offering together for the Church, they agreed that the practice of gratitude was the paramount spirit and practice for their work and for ours. That was a provocative challenge to me in 2010, or could be in any time where very little seems to be going right, or even in the direction of the intended rule of God.

The book has three sections: “Discovering Who We Are,” “Becoming Who We Are,” and “Growing Into the Unknown.” Within these sections are reflections from each of them about particular challenges to praising God. Chittister wrote most of them, and I would like to have seen a more even balance between the two writers. But each of them writes about challenges that resonate with the world in which I live and minister, in ways that feel accessible to anyone. [Read more...]

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“Definitive Bonhoeffer biography for the 21st century” from Eric Metaxas

August 3, 2010 By David Charles 65 Comments

Author and Editor Jana Riess recently interviewed Eric Metaxas about his major new biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Some highlights:

Your subtitle suggests you’ll be looking at four different aspects of Bonhoeffer the man: pastor, martyr, prophet, and spy. Christians are probably used to the first three, but what do most people know about Bonhoeffer as a spy for the Resistance?

In 1939, after Hitler declared war on Poland, and after Bonhoeffer returned from his fateful and abbreviated trip to the U.S., he was asking God what to do next. And what he ended up doing was working for German military intelligence — called the Abwehr — under the supervision of his brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi. But of course Dohnanyi and many others in the Abwehr were involved in the conspiracy against Hitler. That’s why Bonhoeffer joined them! So he became a double agent. On the surface he was working for the Abwehr, but in reality he was working to make contacts with the Allies, to let them know there were Germans inside Germany who were working to overthrow the Third Reich. It’s just amazing.

Bonhoeffer has enjoyed a huge surge in popularity recently. Why do you think his writings are so appealing to people today?

There’s something about Bonhoeffer that just seems extremely modern, as though his whole life and writings were written for us, today. He died young, so he will always be young and will always hold a certain freshness and appeal to young people. But there’s something about his extraordinary authenticity that especially speaks to us today with particular force. He saw right through dead religion and spent his whole adult life trying to show the difference between dead religion and a real and personal faith in Jesus Christ. His unwillingness to abide cant and sloganeering and theological or philosophical chicanery seems particularly appealing to us today, who have had our fill of these things and who long for someone to give us an alternative to them.

Read Jana’s full interview here.

RELATED:

Video Interview with Eric Metaxas

Eric Metaxas Website

Purchase the book at Amazon

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