How can you not like an author who writes this “crazy” recipe:

Here’s a crazy idea. First, you find an ancient Chinese philosophical text–let’s say the most influential book in China’s entire cultural tradition (and also pretty damned important in Korea, Japan, Vietnam and Tibet). Then you put it in the hands of some eighteenth century Jesuit missionaries in China who think it is a corrupted version of the Bible. After that, you go looking for a second group of Jesuits who hate the first group, even though they all call each other “brother,” and convince them to translate the book into Latin. Now Latin, as we all know, is a dead language and of no use to anyone (keep those cards and letters coming!), so you find additional people to translate the book into dozens of other languages, including English. What happens next? Well, suppose a counter-cultural movement develops in Europe and the Americas during the 1960s. Wouldn’t it be great if you had an exotic Asian text that you could embrace in order to show your disdain for conventional middle-class values and frozen TV dinners? And wouldn’t it be especially nice if you could use that text to tell fortunes, write poems, produce novels, compose music, choreograph dances, and create art? Boom! That’s exactly what has happened to the I Ching (also spelled Yijing), or Classic of Changes (also known as the Book of Changes).

Go read the rest of Richard Smith’s ruminations on the I Ching and 7 of the thinkers it has inspired at the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-j-smith/i-ching-religion_b_1453281.html#s906222&title=Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz

It’s always nice to discover a review like this on a Monday morning: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/tale-two-bishops-and-brilliant-saint/

In a round-up review of several books about Augustine and The Confessions, Peter Brown has very nice things to say for the inaugural book in our Lives of Great Religious Books series. Brown says the biography is “another gem of a little book by Garry Wills.”

He continues, writing that “Wills describes brilliantly the manner in which this strange work seeped slowly through literary circles…His book is a passionate plea that we should read Augustine’s strange book as it was first heard, and in the light of the purposes for which it was first written.”

Happily his review dovetails nicely with the purpose of the series which is to examine the history and “life” of major religious texts — tracing generation, interpretation, uses, and misuses over time. We are gearing up for the launch of the next two books in the series — biographies of The Book of Mormon and The I Ching — in April.

Maybe you were lucky enough to be there, or perhaps you caught it live on C-Span, but Martin Marty was interviewed at the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Lit Fest over the weekend. You can watch the program here: http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/Dietr&showFullAbstract=1.

Marty was on hand to discuss the new series The Lives of Great Religious Books and specifically his new book in that series, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has steadily gained prominence through the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but his most famous book — Letters and Papers from Prison — was never really conceived of as a book. It is, as the title suggests, a collection of letters and papers smuggled out of prison, addressed to loved ones and intellectual colleagues. These papers were hidden away and only collected into their current form posthumously–a process Martin E. Marty describes in this article at Berfrois:

“Only a zealous and informed scavenger could have found and assembled scribbled fragments which eventually became the published prison letters by the best-remembered German cleric who gave his life in the anti-Nazi cause,” writes Marty. “There was no manuscript of the book which later appeared in many languages around the world. The gallows took its author, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, before he had a chance to shape a book.”

Marty notes that merely possessing one of the letters could have been a crime or have lead Nazis to conspirators, so, how did these letters survive?

According to Marty, they were secreted “in various hard-to-find locales, including in gas-mask canisters hidden in the garden of Dietrich’s mother; while others were tucked into scattered books and files.”

Fortunately, Eberhard Bethge, a friend of Bonhoeffer’s, “was farseeing enough to recognize that though his friend was writing sometimes casual notes, there were also more formal little treatises which might be cherished by scholars and others who were left behind….So Bethge saved all that he could, even though he had to report regretfully in the book he edited that…in order to protect some people mentioned in the letters, he had no choice but in haste to burn some of them. So the trail of letters ended abruptly, a fact that contributed further to the apparently random character of the book.”

Read the rest of Marty’s article here: http://www.berfrois.com/2011/05/martin-e-marty-on-bonhoeffer/

Tune in to Between the Covers to hear John Miller interview Garry Wills on his new book Augustine’s Confessions: A Biography.

“[Augustine] doesn’t really talk about the things you expect in an autobiography. He doesn’t talk about his sister, his brother. He talks about his mother just briefly, when she dies…He was the court orator for the emperor in Milan. Never mentions his activities there, except to say ‘I was paid to tell lies’…He’s not interested in all that. He’s interested in internal spiritual growth and struggles,” says Wills in this fascinating interview.

Listen to more here and then go pick up this week’s New Statesman to read a terrific excerpt from the book.