In Search of Grace: A Religious Outsider's Journey Across America's Landscape of Faith

Rating:
Summary: A Breath of Fresh Air
Review: I am going through a spiritual journey now, and reading up on many different religions and beliefs. This book is so refreshing. Most books on religion are 3rd person, very bland, and sometimes biased. This book is the complete opposite:1st person POV, so interesting and personal, and very open towards different beliefs. She wants to experience faith, not just learn what people believe. Some experiences she is involved in: An Native american spiritual prayer/blessing ceremony; a retreat w/benedicte (spelled it wrong)monks and nuns, amish, roman catholics, mormons, everybody. This is an actual hands-on experience that sheds so much light into people's spiritual life. This book in no way advocates one belief or another. I feel this is a great experience reading this book because it has opened my eyes so much during my journey. I only wish I had this book when I began my journey, enlightening me on every course I later look into.

Rating:
Summary: A Breath of Fresh Air
Review: In my frequent conversations with Christians, I am often surprised at how many think this is a Christian nation, founded by Christian Fathers. It is true, of course, that most people here claiming religion claim one form or other of Christianity, but it is also true that there is no national religion here and that plenty of the Founding Fathers were not Christians or were even anti-Christian. Given our national history, it is not at all surprising that we should be a religious melting pot. None of the organized religions had included Kristin Hahn when she was growing up. Pushing thirty, tired of working in Hollywood, she determined that she would hit the road to see what religions in America had to offer. The picaresque result, _In Search of Grace: A Religious Outsider's Journey Across America's Landscape of Faith_ (Morrow) came after three years of what was essentially a religious quest. She was not shopping for a religion she could call her own. She was looking to find what universal qualities sincerely religious people seek and display. The broad answers are unsurprising, but the variations in detail of practice and belief in each particular sect are worth reading about.

She did not, of course, shun Christianity, there being more chapters devoted to that belief than to others. She did, however, look into some unusual aspects of different sects of that practice. She had little luck penetrating Harmony, an Amish community, beyond what a usual tourist sees. She participated in prayers with nuns and monks in a Benedictine abbey. Most of us have been visited by Mormon missionaries, but Hahn went testifying with them. The closest she gets to disbelief is at a Unitarian Universalist church, where she is told that although that particular church is "Christian-leaning," the last time Jesus Christ's name was spoken inside the church was when the janitor bumped his head on the basement rafter. In her non-Christian endeavors, she took some peyote with Native Americans. She kept the Sabbath with Reformed and Orthodox Jews. She fasted with Muslims during Ramadan. She used the bogus e-meters of the Church of Scientology. She tortured herself with the rigors of Kundalini yoga, and of different forms of Hindu and Buddhist meditation. She went to a Wiccan convention in a Las Vegas casino, of all places.

It's a wide-ranging survey. Sometimes she is exhausted or perplexed, obviously a tourist within deeply mysterious lands, but she is able to convey the strangeness with clarity. She has been gentle even with the strangest of beliefs, preserving a wide-eyed and seldom critical stance that makes for good understanding and reporting. For each of the main beliefs she has described, she gives a useful capsule history of the faith and its main ideas before going into her own experience of it. No, Hahn did not find a religion she could join. During the time of this intelligent search, she did find a husband, and bore a child, and she wisely incorporates the universal lessons of gratitude, reverence, sanctification of daily events, belonging, and honoring life into her new family. In examining these universals from the many vantages she has taken, she has simply drawn on the best that all religions, even the daffiest, have to offer. It is a good, and particularly American, lesson, and it is an encouragement to ideals of American tolerance.

Rating:
Summary: Traveling Through American Religions
Review: In my frequent conversations with Christians, I am often surprised at how many think this is a Christian nation, founded by Christian Fathers. It is true, of course, that most people here claiming religion claim one form or other of Christianity, but it is also true that there is no national religion here and that plenty of the Founding Fathers were not Christians or were even anti-Christian. Given our national history, it is not at all surprising that we should be a religious melting pot. None of the organized religions had included Kristin Hahn when she was growing up. Pushing thirty, tired of working in Hollywood, she determined that she would hit the road to see what religions in America had to offer. The picaresque result, _In Search of Grace: A Religious Outsider's Journey Across America's Landscape of Faith_ (Morrow) came after three years of what was essentially a religious quest. She was not shopping for a religion she could call her own. She was looking to find what universal qualities sincerely religious people seek and display. The broad answers are unsurprising, but the variations in detail of practice and belief in each particular sect are worth reading about.

She did not, of course, shun Christianity, there being more chapters devoted to that belief than to others. She did, however, look into some unusual aspects of different sects of that practice. She had little luck penetrating Harmony, an Amish community, beyond what a usual tourist sees. She participated in prayers with nuns and monks in a Benedictine abbey. Most of us have been visited by Mormon missionaries, but Hahn went testifying with them. The closest she gets to disbelief is at a Unitarian Universalist church, where she is told that although that particular church is "Christian-leaning," the last time Jesus Christ's name was spoken inside the church was when the janitor bumped his head on the basement rafter. In her non-Christian endeavors, she took some peyote with Native Americans. She kept the Sabbath with Reformed and Orthodox Jews. She fasted with Muslims during Ramadan. She used the bogus e-meters of the Church of Scientology. She tortured herself with the rigors of Kundalini yoga, and of different forms of Hindu and Buddhist meditation. She went to a Wiccan convention in a Las Vegas casino, of all places.

It's a wide-ranging survey. Sometimes she is exhausted or perplexed, obviously a tourist within deeply mysterious lands, but she is able to convey the strangeness with clarity. She has been gentle even with the strangest of beliefs, preserving a wide-eyed and seldom critical stance that makes for good understanding and reporting. For each of the main beliefs she has described, she gives a useful capsule history of the faith and its main ideas before going into her own experience of it. No, Hahn did not find a religion she could join. During the time of this intelligent search, she did find a husband, and bore a child, and she wisely incorporates the universal lessons of gratitude, reverence, sanctification of daily events, belonging, and honoring life into her new family. In examining these universals from the many vantages she has taken, she has simply drawn on the best that all religions, even the daffiest, have to offer. It is a good, and particularly American, lesson, and it is an encouragement to ideals of American tolerance.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and honest
Review: This is a worthwhile addition to any spiritual seeker's bookshelf. Hahn goes to great lengths to interview shining stars in the firmament of several traditions, including Ram Dass (Hinduism), Yogi Bhajan (Sikhism), James Van Praagh (a famous medium included in her chapter on Spiritualism), and Neale Donald Walsch who has started his own spiritual movement with his best-selling Conversations With God books. She also spends time with some fascinating little ordinary people like an Ojibwe medicine man, a blind Amish farmer, a young guy in Alcoholics Anonymous, and a black man who is a self-taught artist illuminating his own understanding of the truth of the Old Testament.

She does the best she can to experience each tradition in its rightful context, and to access more than one disciple's point-of-view, if possible.

I found it fascinating to read through the accounts of the spiritual experiences that did seem to touch her personally (talking with the Native American medicine man, a service at a black Baptist church in Louisiana, keeping the Jewish Sabbath), and the ones that, through no fault of her own, she just did not connect with (auditing with the Scientologists, recruiting with the Mormons, getting a "treatment" for her nail-biting with the Christian Science church). She took a very smart approach to tackling such an immense subject as spirituality: describing on the literal level what each of her personal encounters were like with each faith. Wisely, she didn't try to explain each faith (beyond some italicized basics at the beginning of each chapter), or worse, compare and contrast each faith. In the end, her own personal experiences are revealing and informative.

I give her three solid stars for her honesty and her skill at pursuing such a difficult subject, organizing it, and conveying it in this book. I personally found her a little sarcastic, but then if I'd written the book she probably would have found me a little over-enthusiastic and naive.

I find it interesting in the editorial review by Publisher's Weekly that she got some facts wrong concerning the Mormon faith and the Christian Science faith. My own religion stands closest to her "neo-paganism" chapter, and I can correct a few mistakes I saw there. (1) the priestess who cast the circle in the ritual that Hahn witnessed probably did so with either a wand, known as a wand, or a dagger, known as an athame. I'm not sure where Hahn got the word "anthema." (2) Gerald Gardner was an Englishman, but definitely not of the eighteenth century (!), since he lived between 1884-1964. Otherwise, I found this an enjoyable and informative book and definitely a "keeper" for my collection.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and honest
Review: This is a worthwhile addition to any spiritual seeker's bookshelf. Hahn goes to great lengths to interview shining stars in the firmament of several traditions, including Ram Dass (Hinduism), Yogi Bhajan (Sikhism), James Van Praagh (a famous medium included in her chapter on Spiritualism), and Neale Donald Walsch who has started his own spiritual movement with his best-selling Conversations With God books. She also spends time with some fascinating little ordinary people like an Ojibwe medicine man, a blind Amish farmer, a young guy in Alcoholics Anonymous, and a black man who is a self-taught artist illuminating his own understanding of the truth of the Old Testament.

She does the best she can to experience each tradition in its rightful context, and to access more than one disciple's point-of-view, if possible.

I found it fascinating to read through the accounts of the spiritual experiences that did seem to touch her personally (talking with the Native American medicine man, a service at a black Baptist church in Louisiana, keeping the Jewish Sabbath), and the ones that, through no fault of her own, she just did not connect with (auditing with the Scientologists, recruiting with the Mormons, getting a "treatment" for her nail-biting with the Christian Science church). She took a very smart approach to tackling such an immense subject as spirituality: describing on the literal level what each of her personal encounters were like with each faith. Wisely, she didn't try to explain each faith (beyond some italicized basics at the beginning of each chapter), or worse, compare and contrast each faith. In the end, her own personal experiences are revealing and informative.

I give her three solid stars for her honesty and her skill at pursuing such a difficult subject, organizing it, and conveying it in this book. I personally found her a little sarcastic, but then if I'd written the book she probably would have found me a little over-enthusiastic and naive.

I find it interesting in the editorial review by Publisher's Weekly that she got some facts wrong concerning the Mormon faith and the Christian Science faith. My own religion stands closest to her "neo-paganism" chapter, and I can correct a few mistakes I saw there. (1) the priestess who cast the circle in the ritual that Hahn witnessed probably did so with either a wand, known as a wand, or a dagger, known as an athame. I'm not sure where Hahn got the word "anthema." (2) Gerald Gardner was an Englishman, but definitely not of the eighteenth century (!), since he lived between 1884-1964. Otherwise, I found this an enjoyable and informative book and definitely a "keeper" for my collection.