I checked this book out of the library here in Augusta after I got home from a visit to Myrtle Beach last October, where the art museum was hosting an exhibit of Jonathan Green’s work.

Then last month I visited the Morris Museum of Art here in Augusta, where the painting shown was on display.

I remember trips to the Charleston, SC area to vacation at the beach when I was a teenager. My mom always wanted to stop and buy baskets that the Gullah women sold along the roadsides in the summer. I’m sure she still has some of the baskets, and that they are beautiful. But my fuzzy memories of the low country area from those trips are of poor and dark-skinned women, dressed in drab headscarves, blouses, and long skirts. Aside from a long-ago movie adapted from a Pat Conroy novel, that was my only real exposure to Gullah culture. But in Jonathan Green’s work, the Gullah people’s lives are resplendent with rich color and community set in bright tropical splendor.

Warning: Loneliness has been found to be harmful to your health and well-being…

That’s the jist of this book, which presents research to prove the case and makes a few suggestions for overcoming loneliness. Since I returned this book to the library a few weeks back, the subject keeps coming up for me:

• Of course, there was Valentine’s Day, which can be for many and was for me a reminder of loneliness. Some articles I read on-line around that day, along the same lines as the book, were serious side effects of rejection and genes get lonely too.

• A couple of weeks ago, while researching flirting and shyness on-line, I came across the UCLA loneliness scale. I took the test, and scored almost in the “desperately lonely” category. I re-took it right around Valentine’s Day, and I was relieved to find that I was feeling somehow less lonely at that time.

• According to the book, loneliness is an emotional cue that has evolved to help us want to socialize, but when the feeling is chronic, it can backfire and keep us isolated. The cure is to get around other people, and one suggestion is to volunteer in order to connect with others. Yesterday, while going through old papers, I found an article I’d clipped from our local paper back in 2006, titled “More Americans make effort to stay connected”, which describes a volunteer group called “Little Brothers—Friends of the Elderly” in San Francisco. I have been visiting some elderly and housebound members of our church in the past few weeks. Maybe that helps to explain why I’m feeling a little less lonely and a little more connected myself lately.

I downloaded this picture of Jesus, the Good Shepherd, from a 3rd century fresco in the catacombs of Priscilla, because this is the illustration used on the bookjacket of my copy of this book. I like it better than the default All-Consuming/Amazon picture. I think it gives a more accurate view of the tone of this book. The author is a very careful historian, determined to say only things about the life and character of Jesus which are backed by good historical evidence, and to present that evidence in a simple and understandable way.

I had this book out forever from our church library, where they don’t charge any late fees, and I’m determined to take it back today. The book is clear and easy to read in spite of its somewhat academic tone. I wish I could say that I’ve spent a lot of time studying and absorbing all the information in this book, but alas, I did not. One particular idea that stuck with me is the author’s claim that, comparing Jesus with other legendary historical figures, we certainly know much more about someone like Thomas Jefferson from the large amount of source material that still exists. In contrast, we know much less about someone like Alexander the Great, at least in terms of what he thought and believed, because all of the original source material has been lost.

I borrowed this book from the library in honor of wren’s goal to compile a master Virgo list on 43-T. It has a page for every day of the year, and information about your horoscope if that day is your birthday, including a list of famous people born on your day, numbers and planets and tarot information for your day (Greek to me), health information, advice, and a meditation. It was fun to look up horoscopes for friends and family members, and for people on 43-T who were having birthdays, and to learn more about my own sign of Virgo.

I don’t know exactly what it was that prompted me to choose this book from the library, but I found it timely. It describes Giotto’s career as a very famous and very influential painter in Italy during the early 1300’s. This was a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, which his art reflected. However, after his death in 1337, Florence suffered, of all things, A HUGE BANKING CRISIS! Sounds familiar. The really bad news is that, right after the resulting economic failure, they suffered pestilence, crop failure, famine, finally followed by the Black Death of 1348, which swept through all Italy and later into the rest of Europe, killed HALF of the people of Florence and about ONE THIRD of all Europeans. Convinced that God was punishing them, some people abandoned all faith and formed cults of Satan, others became religious hysterics, and many donated to the church out of a sense of guilt, with consequent full employment for artists. Their art “became dour, harsh, and didactic, reverting to the austerity and otherworldliness of a century before”, and stayed that way for 50 years, until Giotto was re-discovered during the Renaissance.

Moral of the story? I don’t know. Maybe that things today, even though they seem bad, could get a lot worse. (Or maybe that art is a good career choice in bad times?)

I just happened to spot this book on the “new books” shelf at the library last month, and grabbed it, because I like Karen Armstrong’s writing.

I read through it quickly, and I was trying to read so many other things at the same time that I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. She does write a lot about interpretation of the Bible through the ages, and she uses the scary Greek terms like “exegesis” and “hermeneutics” a lot, which make the reading a bit challenging. She does provide a glossary to define these terms.

I think the main idea I’ve come away with, which she develops through the book and summarizes in the last chapter, is that some of the greatest exegetes [interpreters] of the past, including Hillel, Jesus, Paul, Johanan Ben Zakkai, Akiba, and Augustine, insisted that charity and loving kindness were essential to Biblical interpretation. And she asks this question at the end: “What would it mean to interpret the whole of the Bible as a ‘commentary’ on the Golden Rule?” Good question.

The Mindful Way Through Depression has been a wonderfully helpful book for me. I found it in the new book section of my local library, including a meditation CD. The book is very clearly written, and outlines a program for covering the material. The main message of the book is that meditation is a tool that one can learn and use to combat the bad habit of ruminative thinking, where we try to think our way out of depression by regretting the past and worrying about the future and end up even more depressed. In the past two weeks, I have put what I’ve learned to the test in order to get through a bout with shingles, a disease involving the nerves that seems almost like a stress barometer. The more stressed I feel, the more I hurt. So, the disease has given me the opportunity to practice the meditation techniques I’ve learned, and then has given me instantaneous feedback as to whether I’m doing it right or not. It’s not that pain goes away entirely; it’s that I learn not to add anything extra to the pain by worrying and fretting and panicking. I’m thankful to have read this book and hope to keep practicing its principles.

Today, as I write about Amish Grace, yet another tragic school shooting, this time at Northern Illinois University, is in the news. This book explores an event that took place in October 2006, where a non-Amish man shot several young Amish girls in cold blood at an elementary school near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The local Amish community was so quick to forgive the killer’s family that this story superceded the story of the shooting. The book discusses how and why the Amish have forgiven in this and other circumstances, and yet how they can shun their own friends and family members who fail to conform with the Ordnung, the Amish rules of order. My book group had voted to study this book, and it did lead to some interesting discussions.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me) is a book that I found on the new book shelf at my local library. The part of the book that really spoke to me (and made me feel very uncomfortable) was the chapter about marriages and relationships. Having gone through a divorce, I know it is so much easier and more satisfying to blame the other partner for the failure, and so much harder and uncomfortable to take a square look at the mistakes that I’ve made, not to mention admitting them to others or attempting to make amends for them. But that is the whole point of the book: that, especially in our culture today, we are almost blind about extent to which we go to blame others for mistakes and to justify our own.

Revelation, a novel, is an expansion of a short story by author Peggy Payne called “The Pure in Heart.” I read the short story in a book discussion group several months ago and enjoyed it, so I ordered the novel through the Georgia Pines interlibrary loan system. It took about 2 months to get the book, but it did finally arrive. I enjoyed it, but not as much as the short story. (Maybe the problem was that I wasn’t feeling well when I read it.)

While waiting for the book, I’ve found that I enjoy reading Peggy Payne’s Boldness Blog.