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If you think a novel about a saint is likely to be a dry and airy sort of thing, think again. Godric was a 12th-century saint--born to Anglo-Saxon parents in Norfolk almost in the year of the Norman invasion (1066 for those of you long unschooled!). He was a peddler and wanderer long before he settled into the life of a hermit in northern England, led there by the famous hermit St. Cuthbert, who told him, "your true nesting place lies farther on, [and] until you reach it, every other place you find will fret you like a cage."
In Godric Frederick Buechner captures the voice and the times of this saint with a style that recalls the richly alliterative language of Middle English poetry. So too does it recall the beautiful earthiness of that literature, reminding us that this time of deep spirituality was also a time of real flesh-and-blood folk. And in some ways this is the deepest point of this delightful (and at times comic) novel: these people, like those who live among us today, become saints not by leaving the body behind but by finding a way to live more deeply within it. They find a way to turn it to glory. --Doug Thorpe
Book Description
Frederick Buechner's Godric "retells the life of Godric of Finchale, a twelfth-century English holy man whose projects late in life included that of purifying his moral ambition of pride...Sin, spiritual yearning, rebirth, fierce asceticism--these hagiographic staples aren't easy to revitalize but Frederick Buechner goes at the task with intelligent intensity and a fine readiness to invent what history doesn't supply. He contrives a style of speech for his narrator--Godric himself--that's brisk and tough-sinewed...He avoids metaphysical fiddle, embedding his narrative in domestic reality--familiar affection, responsibilities, disasters...All on his own, Mr. Buechner has managed to reinvent projects of self-purification and of faith as piquant matter for contemporary fiction [in a book] notable for literary finish...Frederick Buechner is a very good writer indeed." -- Benjamin DeMott, The New York Times Book Review
"From the book's opening sentence...and sensible reader will be caught in Godric's grip...Godric glimmers brightly." -- Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek
"Godric is a memorable book...a marvelous gem of a book...destined to become a classic of its kind." -- Michael Heskett, Houston Chronicle
"In the extraordinary figure of Godric, both stubborn outsider and true child of God, both worldly and unworldly, Frederick Buechner has found an ideal means of exploring the nature of spirituality. Godric is a living battleground where God fights it out with the world, the Flesh, and the Devil." -- London Times Literary Supplement
"Wityh a poet's sensibly and a high reverent fancy, Frederick Buechner paints a memorable portrait." -- Edmund Fuller, The Wall Street Journal
Customer Reviews:
A book to treasure.......2007-07-07
Beautiful, profound book. Buechner is one of those rare authors that seem to "get" spirituality and his prose is better than anybody.
Excellent read........2006-10-11
In Godric, Buechner brings to life a twelfth century hermit, a topic I had previously considered dry and uninteresting. Through beautiful, often poetic language and a first person account of the man's life, Beuchner effectively humanizes the ascetic holy man and manages to interpret quite an interesting tale. The novel is separated into very short chapters of stylized first person narrative, many of which I read multiple times for the sheer music of the author's words. Godric is a quick, fairly easy read, but certainly a thought provoking novel that you may choose to read an extra time or two.
Interesting.......2005-09-05
Godric is a historical novel based on the life of a real person. What makes this book unusual as historical fiction is its written as if Godric himself wrote it 1000 years ago, as if we are reading a historical document, including period grammer and sentence structure (although not scholarly or difficult for the modern reader to read and understand). This made Buechner's job difficult considering nothing of this type of literary work exists from the period, thus it is fundamentally anachronistic. Further, while we know broad brushstrokes of Godrics life, Buechner filled in many details from the period we simply dont know about.
If you can see past the obvious anachronisms (which I had trouble) there are some valuable descriptions, such as a blood libel, that are imaginative and help to better understand the Middle Ages and how people thought and why.
Moving, Funny, Poignant, Poetic.......2003-05-18
Everyone points out that this little novel is graceful and poetic, and they couldn't be more correct. Throughout the novel, I marveled at the simple beauty of the words and the way they are put together, and it wasn't until later that I realized why. This novel is so meticulously put together that each sentence is written in iambs. I think that fact kind of holds within how wonderful this novel it is. It is a carefully constructed and beautiful portrait of a life persevering, persisting toward sainthood.
Everything about this novel is perfect. Of course, each sentence is perfect, and at times, I would go back a read and reread certain chapters which strike me so profoundly. The relationships held herein, such as Godric's loving relationship with Burcwen, with Mouse, and with Reginald, are subtle complex and really touching. And of course, Godric's own characterization is the biggest strength of the novel, as he moves from the worst of sinners to a godly, compassionate, and humble man.
I can't say enough for this perfect novel. I am sure that I will return again and again to its pages for the humor and warmth and beauty held therein.
saintliness & poetry hiding in plain sight.......2002-10-14
Two thirds of my first time through Frederic Beuchner's re-imagining of the story of Godric, I realized that I had been reading blank verse for page after beautiful page. The beauty, earthy comedy, and plain-spokenness of the tale were so far uppermost in my mind that my ear didn't even calculate the music it was enjoying at first. Godric-Deric-Godericus-Drick-Godric bawls his story with such epic wrathfulness and lullabies it with such unearthly tenderness that we take it for the beating of our own blood, and not the mostly iambic measure. In the same way, Godric's self-knowledge, his all-too-human grief and shame at the imperfect acts of an imperfect life, and his savage irony at the biographer sent to him by his friend, serve to cast his saintliness into the shadows of a life lived ever in the presence of his own shadow self. But if we read with the eye of an open heart, the gentle, courteous irony is that Godric emerges for us much as the saint his medieval hagiographer, Reginald, would have had us believe him to be. Indeed, perhaps more the saint, because Godric makes us party to all the darker details of his struggle toward God. This is not an expose of the unseemly details behind the gilded sweetness of a medieval golden legend. It is an exigesis of a human heart. We are made, by singing Godric's song with him, raging his rages, freezing with him in the River Wear, to understand things at some level that no 20th century mind easily understands--punishing the flesh in freezing water and chafing irons, immuring oneself in a wood with not but a pair of serpents for companions, leaving off a life of prosperity for a life of privation, setting God above any mental, spiritual, or heart's ease, seeing visions, dreaming dreams, groveling in prayer until one's knees are callused, believing to the very depths of self there is a God and that God shows himself to us as the Blessed Virgin, or as a face made of leaves. The Godric of history is said to have been born about the time of William the Conquerer and to have lived a hundred years or more. The time, then, includes some of the same years readers of the popular Brother Cadfael mysteries by Ellis Peters will have encountered. It's a holy side trip from the cozy monastic whodunits to explore the isolated woodlands near Durham, and enter more fully the lives of the poor and dispossessed of those hard times. I have just finished reading this brief book a second time. I'm sure I'll read it many more, for love and pity's sake, for God visiting Godric, and for the music.
Product Description
At its heart, Koula is the story of an improbable love affair. It is the story of Koula, a middle-aged married woman who falls in love with a young man that she meets routinely on the subway ride home to her husband and kids. Attracted to older women (in fact, he occasionally accepts money to sleep with them), the young man in question introduces Koula to a different life than she's used to, a life filled with cigarettes, seedy bars, and illicit meetings in a rundown apartment. Filmed for Greek television, Koula is a stylistically bold book that ranges in tone as it charts the emotional fluctuations of these two characters, fully capturing their interior lives, from the anticipation surrounding their meeting to the dissolution of their affair.
Customer Reviews:
Love Underground..........2006-01-03
Koumantareas is considered to be a leading Greek novelist, having won the Greek equivalent of the National Book Award 3 times. This short novel, published by The Dalkey Archive, is about a charming love affair between an older conservative woman and a younger bohemian in Athens. They purposefully cross each other's path daily in their commute from school/work. At first the characters notice each other; there is a sense of tension. They strike up conversation and the young man is quickly takes her to a bohemian bar. They end up in a secluded apartment for a passionate love affair.
This novel is stylistically moody and makes you wonder about all of those awkward glances you get from those you see everyday but will never speak to.
Forbidden Love.......2005-11-26
Koula treats Dimitri like a little mother, warning him not to dress so casually when it's cold outside. He's like a little boy in some ways, she thinks to herself as, mentally, she restrains herself from reaching out and touching the goosebumps on his bare arm.
Koula has two children herself, girls of ten and thirteen. Dimitri's only 21 herself, but he seems to be attracted to her. What's a woman to do? Little by little Koula finds herself giving in, as she sees him daily. Once she catches him crying. It's absurd, but she feels twinges of love for him! Author Menes Koumantareas knows women from the inside out, or so it seems, how would I know? She, Koula, seems real to me, and her quandaries seem like those of a person entering middle age and, perhaps, hoping for one last tryst with life itself. "Girls of my age bore me to death," he confesses, although she's seem him with her own eyes huddled intimately with a young girl. Somehow she believes him. This is sort of a Greek version of Summer of 42 or Brief Encounter.
Anyone who's been on the Athenian underground will understand the intimate allegory Koumantareas proposes, first the progress between stations, cutting deep through the belly of the ancient city, and the sexual impulse growing ever stronger with the subway's ambient musics. Out on the street, "a few bitter-orange trees gave out a faint, wintry scent."
Translator Kay Cicellis provides us with a open sesame into Koumantareas' electrically charged universe. She is especially good at catching the mood of his story. How it veers from comic to melancholy, sometimes by the end of a sentence. I won't spoil the story for you any more, just urge you to give it a try. Friends in Greece have long urged me to try reading some of Menes' Koumantareas's work. He is like the Reynolds Price of Greece, they say. Now I can, and you can too.
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La democratie congolaise "brulee" au petrole (Collection Points de vue)
Yitzhak Koula
Manufacturer: L'Harmattan
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
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Perspectives On Ecology
Koula Mellos
Manufacturer: Humanity Press/prometheus Bk
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 0333453042 |
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Perspectives on Ecology: A Critical Essay
Koula Mellos
Manufacturer: Palgrave Macmillan
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ASIN: 0312024177 |
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Pluralisme Et Deliberation: Enjeux En Philosophie Politique Contemporaine
Manufacturer: Univ of Ottawa Pr
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Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 2760304906 |
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Principles of Economics: Macroeconomics (Test Yourself)
Kenneth Parzyoh
Manufacturer: NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0844223719 |
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Principles of Economics: Microeconomics (Test Yourself)
Kenneth M. Parzych , and
Kenneth Parayoh
Manufacturer: Ntc Pub Group
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ASIN: 0844223727 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Los Angeles Business Journal, published by CBJ, L.P. on May 19, 2003. The length of the article is 5891 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: Former Vivendi marketer aims to alter academic hue. (People).(Iris Gelt)(Interview)
Author: Koula Gianulias
Publication:
Los Angeles Business Journal (Magazine/Journal)
Date: May 19, 2003
Publisher: CBJ, L.P.
Volume: 25
Issue: 20
Page: 24(1)
Article Type: Interview
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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Epiloge epangelmatos: Pragmatikoteta e mythos?
Koula Kasimate
Manufacturer: Ethniko Kentro Koinonikon Ereunon
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Binding: Unknown Binding
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ASIN: 9607093062 |
Book Description
Enter the continuing story of double agent Paul Stepola as he works to protect his fellow believers from the government that is trying to eliminate Christians. The underground church is in mortal peril following the apocalyptic events in Los Angeles, which have only cast further suspicion upon Christians. Meanwhile, Paul struggles with how to tell his family about his newfound faith without raising the suspicions of his ruthless father-in-law. A gripping, futuristic thriller that will keep you glued to the page.
Download Description
Enter the continuing story of double agent Paul Stepola as he works to protect his fellow believers from the government that is trying to eliminate Christians. The underground church is in mortal peril following the apocalyptic events in Los Angeles, which have only cast further suspicion upon Christians. Meanwhile, Paul struggles with how to tell his family about his newfound faith without raising the suspicions of his ruthless father-in-law. A gripping, futuristic thriller that will keep you glued to the page. "
Customer Reviews:
First in a winning series of three.......2007-05-14
Mr. Jenkins has taken a topic that is current and turned it into a "What if" series making you think about the current state of affairs between Religion and politics. The characters are interesting, and the topic hits home.
Great cliff hanger.......2006-07-26
Silenced continued where Soon left off. It immediately pulled me back into the story. The ending was done in great cliff hanging style and I was pleased that I had already purchased the next and last book in this series. Aside from the fictional plot, the storyline gives way to self examination and evaluation.
Enjoyable Reading!.......2006-03-06
I loved this book! The suspense was great and the willingness to portray God as a prayer answering God is just worthy to be praised. He really does hear and answer prayer and this book is one of those rare reminders that sometimes we ask for BIG stuff and because He's able to, He ANSWERS us!
That same amazing style.......2006-01-28
For me, Tim LaHaye provided the research, but Jerry Jenkins really put heart into the left behind series. Any doubt that I had was erased with Soon and,especially Silenced. His same amazing literary voice is loud and clear in this book, and I had a really tough time choosing between The Regime and Shadowed, but I'm buying the Regime in the next 2 weeks anyway.
Soon and Silenced.......2005-09-27
This is a new series by Jerry Jenkins. If you like the Left Behind series you will enjoy this equally as well.
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Silenced - The Wrath Of God Descends
Jerry B. Jenkins
Manufacturer: Recorded Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio CD
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| Religion & Spirituality
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ASIN: 1402594607 |
Product Description
Recorded on 9 Cd's (10 hours). Comes in clamshell case.
Product Description
7 cassettes in box.
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Silenced the Wrath of God Descends
Jerry Jenkins
Manufacturer: Recorded Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Audio Cassette
Jenkins, Jerry
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ASIN: B000RJ73NQ |
Book Description
In this landmark book of interreligious dialogue, the Dalai Lama provides an extraordinary Buddhist perspective on the teachings of Jesus, commenting on well-known passages from the four Christian Gospels including the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the mustard seed, the Resurrection, and others.
Customer Reviews:
More insights re: The Dalai Lama.......2007-01-06
This year I've been learning more about Buddhism and have enjoyed reading the teachings of the Dalai Lama in several texts. The Good Heart offered interesting comparisons of the Christian and Buddhist perspectives, reflecting on specific Christian Gospel teachings. As a Christian who wants to learn more about the breadth of God's world and the people in it, I found the commentaries thought-provoking. Christians can learn much from the Dalai Lama about respecting others' points of view, and about what it means to be kind and compassionate toward others.
Be advised the book is the commentary and dialogue from the 1994 John Main Seminar, "an annual international spiritual event held in honor of the Benedictine monk John Main,whom Father Bede Griffiths once called the most important spiritual guide in the church today." pg 1
"In his opening remards, the Dalai Lama spoke about the importance of all the different forms of dialogue being practiced today between religions. He affirmed the importance of scholarly dialogue. But he also said that he felt the most important and--to use a characteristic term for a Buddhist--the most effective dialogue was not intellectual exchange, but a conversation between sincere practitioners from the position of their own faiths, a conversation that arises from a sharing of their respective practices." p5
Unbelievably sentimentalistic book!.......2007-01-05
OK. This book was obviously written from the perspective "Thou art holier than I". At times it gets so sugary it makes me want to gag...Everybody is complimenting the Dalai Lama right and left, but unfortunately, despite the Dalai Lama's warning that one should not try to put a yaks's head on a sheep body, these Christian morons consistently fail to ask tough questions, tripping on themselves to avoid pointing out insurmountable divergencies between the two traditions. The Dalai Lama basically uses the Gospel texts to teach Buddhist doctrine, a strategy the Jesuits used to be masters at (in reverse). He is charming, profound as usual, but obviously totally unaware of the Christian tradition. So, next time, instead of getting into the business of "uh-oh-ah, please teach us how to read OUR OWN TEXTS!", I would like to see Dalai Lama's interlocutors do their job in a hopefully more critical and challenging way. And next time, please, oh, please, choose better texts!!!!
I love it.......2006-11-13
It is always gratifying (to me anyway) to see how others see Christianity. I feel the Dalai Lama (as well as one or two other "non-christian" authors) capture the spirit of Christianity and truly understand it. This was a wonderful read and I would highly recommend it to anyone.
Good Heart - Good Marriage.......2006-03-11
My wife is a practising Catholic, while I'm a practising Buddhist.
This meaningful book help guide our family spiritual practice, to the dismay of some fundamentalists/extremists from both sides.
May all beings be well and happy.
A Review by Saint Cool.......2006-02-20
One last note...Resistance at all costs...is of upmost importance for the very sake of your sanity. Do not become assimilated! We are all of devine nature(all but Borgs)...think about that...a creation of divenity...we are all devine of nature..how else could we be alive, conscience, aware of these cool and amazing words you are reading here...to realize such..and act in accordance w/the will of God/Universe...this is the tricky part for so many. But it works. this truth has been around since the ancients..before them even...why..before time itself. God is eternal(you too mortal! ;-) Not as cool as God though...and a bit confused, but anyways...there's a purpose for us all, even worms...most good one..most excellent purpose! It is old school time ladies and gents/boyz and girlfriends...but you can have fun...don't worry. We all have a reason for our life here on this ball in outerspace. Muahhahaha. Anyways...For an eternal all knowing God/creator...one would presume things are pretty well thought out here...for real. ;-) Practice "good karma" it is the best way to fly. Destiny is for real.."good"or "bad"...but can be changed, focus on the real..you know what it is...and and faith in God is for real, and there is no denying even if you do...God is not some spirit punk out to punish you..although you may deserve it and God has not choice...I believe every devine decision is ultimiately for the may lay down some hurt on your ass...but you will be better off in the long run, may desrvee it, and become stronger, wiser...So you earth bound mortals..it is a magic thing...not about stocks and bonds...take a guess...its inside you...provided by God. living it...of course...one can never be overly cautious...especially of the Borg! Take no fear thoug "God makes everything right in the End"...PEACE !:-)
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Journal of Ecumenical Studies, published by Journal of Ecumenical Studies on September 22, 1997. The length of the article is 477 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus. (book reviews)
Author: John B., Jr. Cobb
Publication:
Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 1997
Publisher: Journal of Ecumenical Studies
Volume: v34
Issue: n4
Page: p580(1)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Books:
- Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
- I'm Not Scared
- Imagining Argentina
- In Case We're Separated: Connected Stories
- Inside the Hornet's Head: An Anthology of Jewish American Writing
- Interview with the Vampire: Anniversary edition (The vampire chronicles)
- Kissing in Manhattan
- La fiesta del chivo (Punto de Lectura)
- Las intermitencias de la muerte
- Las Vegas and Beyond
Books Index
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