<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Lovely
Review: Frederick Buechner articulates the beauty, pain, and irony of life so wonderfully. This book helped me see the mundane, trivial, and routine of my life as a source of joy and a gift of nothing but the grace of God...Buechner is an artist, a poet, a musician of words...This is a great book to "sample" his great works and choose which one of them to read next! Buechner helped me to recognize that the sadness and tragedy of life don't have to be ignored or explained away to retain faith in the goodness of God...We have to appreciate the stark and the empty and the need before we can find a fix or a salve...I can read one of these passages and it stays with me for days...definitely a recommended read, for believers or searchers of any denomination...
Rating:
Summary: Amplification of Life
Review: Frederick Buechner articulates the beauty, pain, and irony of life so wonderfully. This book helped me see the mundane, trivial, and routine of my life as a source of joy and a gift of nothing but the grace of God...Buechner is an artist, a poet, a musician of words...This is a great book to "sample" his great works and choose which one of them to read next! Buechner helped me to recognize that the sadness and tragedy of life don't have to be ignored or explained away to retain faith in the goodness of God...We have to appreciate the stark and the empty and the need before we can find a fix or a salve...I can read one of these passages and it stays with me for days...definitely a recommended read, for believers or searchers of any denomination...
Rating:
Summary: A literary devotional for the skeptic and believer alike
Review: Frederick Buechner is one of our greatest treasures--a wonderful prose writer, a great story-teller, an insightful theologian. His body of work is as diverse as any writer I've ever heard of--fiction, myth, sermons, lectures, memoirs, lexicons, humor, etc. This book provides a great overview of 30 years of his writing--all in brief daily doses. While some of the exerpts suffer from being pulled out of their contexts, they have been well and carefully chosen, and stand alone well. Buechner's recurring theme is that God exists and acts in our lives today--we just have to learn to listen for him and recognize those acts. Read as a devotional, this book provides many flashes of insight and understanding, and many gentle reminders of the Truth that undergirds our lives.
Rating: 
Summary: Not sure about this
Review: I liked these snippets when they were in context, in the works from which they were riven, rather than plunked down with an arbitrary date. I read them for awhile, then lost interest, and I've NEVER lost interest in a Buechner work before. Much better devotionals out there, whatever your theological leaning.
Rating:
Summary: Not sure about this
Review: I liked these snippets when they were in context, in the works from which they were riven, rather than plunked down with an arbitrary date. I read them for awhile, then lost interest, and I've NEVER lost interest in a Buechner work before. Much better devotionals out there, whatever your theological leaning.
Rating:
Summary: Buechner's Autobiographical Readings
Review: I only thought that I had read Frederick's nearly best words!
While visiting Montreat one summer, I accidentally met the young lady named Stacey_____ who has the unending task of editing and selecting manuscripts to remain in Wheaton's Archives for his legacy. I wish I knew how to reach her...there or at The Chicago Tribune! This fabulous collection of his readings comes from the hands of his friend George Connor. He was outstanding Prof of Literature at the Univ of Chattanooga when we were students there in the 1950's! His selections from "A Room Called Remember, Wishful Thinking & Whistling in the Dark," are right on target for me! When he writes about "autobiography becomes a way of praying," I am totally in agreement. Also with his most descriptive beauty in using such adverbs as..."enigmatically, inexplicably, and realistically, (sprinkled around)... Freudians and Jungians, prophets and poets, philosophers, fortune tellers and phonies all have their own claims about what dreams mean." I resonate and even reverberate with those words! I was so excited to choose this very descriptive and especially relevant collection for my poignant needs in my life of writing!
Retired & Ret-read, Chaplain Fred W Hood
Rating:
Summary: Lovely
Review: I return to this book again and again. It doesn't ask that you believe anything in particular. It ranges over all kinds of topics. Buechner gives us his wisdom, wonder, doubt and love in equal and generous measure. I have found his works to be deeply liberating because there is no dogma... mostly there is hope, poetry, some new visions of faith, room to doubt, room to soar... Mostly, he shows us his deep deep humanity. Thank you, Mr. Buechner.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent daily devotional
Review: Most daily devotionals that I have worked with in the past have often been sentimental drivel. Buechner's excellent, concise and often poetic writing boldly confronts the daily battles a person of faith encounters. Eschewing simple HALLMARK CARD sentimentality and post-modern sound bite obsession, Buechner lays out a series of daily meditations that comfort, challenge and re-enforce as well as affirm one's faith. I particularly admire Buechner's constant celebration of the purity of silence- the need for listening and contemplation. An excellent daily devotional written by one of our finest contemporary theologians.
<< 1 >>
|
