Greetings from Amazon.com Delivers Spirituality and Inspiration In an exclusive essay for Amazon.com, Philip Zaleski, editor of the celebrated "Best Spiritual Writing 1999," tells us that spiritual literature at the end of the millennium is all the rage. Also, find out which books made the cut for HarperSanFrancisco's 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century. You can find "The Best Spiritual Writing 1999" at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062518054/entertainmentsit ****** Letters from the Soul An essay by Philip Zaleski I live in a cozy New England college town, celebrated for its art galleries, music clubs, coffee shops, and tattooed teenagers. There are lots of bookstores here as well: one specializes in feminism, another in fantasy and science fiction, several in used volumes; one even advertises "books of the weird." But the largest reading market in town is none of the above: it is, rather, the spiritual bookstore. A generation or two ago, such a development would have been unthinkable--there were, to my knowledge, no spiritual bookstores back then--but today it seems almost par for the course. Religion is riding high in the American saddle: 90 percent of us pray regularly; 50 percent of us attend weekly church. As sociologist and priest Andrew Greeley puts it, we are "a nation of mystics." Spiritual writing regularly tops the bestseller lists, filling the briefcases of corporate kingpins and the knapsacks of college kids. The genre has never been healthier, as "The Best Spiritual Writing 1999" bears witness. I've watched this boom as a writer, editor, and college teacher. My students at Smith College are constantly buying new books to sort out their religious lives. In my work at "Parabola" magazine, a quarterly journal of mythology and religion, I've watched thousands of manuscripts about the inner life pour over the transom; sometimes the very air seems thick with spiritual writing. Much of it is forgettable--maudlin confession, crackpot scholarship, channeled babble. But there's also a lot of good material, writing that bears the twin marks of literary excellence and spiritual insight. I realized early on that much of this writing--including some of the best--was doomed to quick extinction, enjoying a mayfly's life in small journals or mass-circulation monthlies before banishment into wastebaskets or the limbo of library archives. When John Loudon, the crackerjack HarperSanFrancisco editor of one of my earlier books, "Gifts of the Spirit," proposed that I edit "The Best Spiritual Writing 1998" as the first volume in an ongoing series, I leapt at the idea. Here was a chance to separate gold from tin, to preserve the very best spiritual writing--including essay, poetry, memoir, homily, scholarship, and traditional tale--in book form for a new, more diverse readership, and thus help to bring the genre into its maturity. The response to the inaugural volume and its successor, "The Best Spiritual Writing 1999," has been enthusiastic, demonstrating that there is, indeed, a hunger for outstanding spiritual writing. It's fascinating to reflect on the reasons for this eruption of spiritual literature at the end of the millennium. Some might trace it to fallout from the atom bomb. Certainly baby boomers, the first generation to come of age under a mushroom cloud, are also the first, at least in this century, to devour spiritual writing in such massive quantities. The reason seems obvious: there are no atheists in foxholes. But a great movement rarely blossoms in response to immediate social problems. Rather, it answers a long-felt need, a desperate hunger grown more acute over decades or even centuries. In the case of religion and spirituality, starvation has been building for 400 years, since the Enlightenment first challenged the traditional vision of God, paving the way for Marx, Darwin, and Freud to reduce the human being to a complex of economic, biological, or psychological vectors. The revolution against reductionism, when it burst forth in the latter part of this century, was wild and undisciplined. People turned to drugs, sex, gurus of every stripe, whatever breached the walls of the mechanistic box in which they had been caged. Things have calmed down now. The period of free-form experimentation has passed into one of more disciplined searching. New approaches to religion abound, exemplified by such diverse movements as the New Age, the post-Vatican II Catholic Church, and the importation of Eastern practices to Western shores. At the same time, vast numbers of people have returned to traditional faiths with renewed vitality. This eager embrace of both past and future is evident, I believe, in "The Best Spiritual Writing" volumes. Recently, it inspired a new project as well, in which, with the help of a panel of distinguished scholars and writers, I compiled a list of the 100 best spiritual books of the century. How splendid it was to confirm our intuition that this century, ravaged by two of the most virulent anti-spiritual ideologies in history--fascism and communism--was nonetheless, in its joyous experimentation, its reverence for wisdom, and its willingness to face evil head-on, one of the great eras of spiritual writing. From where I sit, the future looks pretty exciting. --Philip Zaleski is senior editor of Parabola magazine and author of "Gifts of the Spirit" and "The Recollected Heart." He teaches religion at Smith College and literature at Wesleyan University. Featured in this e-mail: "The Best Spiritual Writing 1999" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0062518054/entertainmentsit Find out which books made HarperSanFrancisco's 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=entertainmentsit&path=tg/feature/-/15966 ****** Stumped for gift ideas? Just for the holidays, we've hand-picked our favorite titles and stocked the store with book collections, rare finds, calendars, and even bags to put them in. Books Home Page ****** You'll find more great books, articles, excerpts, and interviews in Amazon.com's Religion & Spirituality section at Religion & Spirituality ******
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