Editors: Jeff Sharlet, Peter Manseau Binding Information: Paperback
Trade Code: 00P
Price:$16.00 In stock.
The second collection to have sprung from religious commentators Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau's popular alternative Web site, KillingTheBuddha.com, Believer, Beware brings together first-person stories with the sensibility of This American Life, ranging from that of a Jewish teen who thinks she is the messiah to a Bible-camp counselor instructing his charges in a religion he is actively questioning to a Muslim hoping to move beyond a tradition of fatalism. By turns poignant, irreverent, and even funny, this collection offers a variety of insights gained from critical engagement with beliefs from all corners.
Surprised by God is a religious coming-of-age story, from the mosh pit to the Mission District and beyond. It's the memoir of a young woman who found, lost, and found again communities of like-minded seekers, all the while taking a winding, semi-reluctant path through traditional Jewish practice that eventually took her to the rabbinate.
Surprised by God is the memoir of a young woman's spiritual awakening and eventual path to the rabbinate. It's a post-dotcom, third-wave, punk-rock Seven Storey Mountain—the story of integrating life on the edge of the twenty-first century into the discipline of traditional Judaism without sacrificing either. It's also an unflinchingly honest guide to the kind of work that goes into developing a spiritual practice in today's world—and why, perhaps, doing this in today's world requires more work than it ever has.
Author: Varda Polak-Sahm Binding Information: Paperback
Trade Code: 00P
Price:$20.00Backorder policy Not yet published. Will ship on: September 7, 2010
For Orthodox Jews, immersion in the mikveh is the cornerstone of family life. Jewish women must visit this ritual bath before marriage and monthly after menstruation before resuming marital relations. Yet women from across the Jewish spectrum frequent the mikveh, often for surprising personal reasons. Roused by her own immersion experience, for years Varda Polak-Sahm, a secular Jew, patiently observed and interviewed women at the mikveh, gaining unprecedented access to this hidden world of purity, sexuality, and fertility. Her uncensored firsthand account of an experience that is for some holy and for others coercive illuminates the power of ritual immersion for the growing number of women reclaiming this practice.
Roused by her own experiences of immersion, for eleven years Varda Polak-Sahm patiently observed and interviewed Jewish women using the mikveh, gaining unprecedented access to the entirely hidden feminine culture and sensual atmosphere within traditional mikvehs. The result is a richly nuanced, uncensored look at an experience that is for some holy and for others coercive. The House of Secrets gives voice to women from all branches of Judaism as they open up about what the mikveh means to them; how it fits in with their attitudes toward religion; its effect on their marriages and families as well as on their sexual, physical, and spiritual self-perception and on their relationship with God.
Beacon Press is a department of the Unitarian Universalist Association
