Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith by Kathleen Norris, has been my daily spiritual reading for a few months. I assigned myself a chapter a day. Maybe a couple of chapters because a chapter could have been one paragraph or half a page. At most, a long chapter was about four pages; just perfect for me.
Norris begins by explaining her pious childhood and then her adolescent rebelling. As an adult, she tried to figure out why she had abandoned her families' religious sensibility. She decided that it must have been the vocabulary. The church vocabulary was off-putting in the secular world she was living. Hence, this book is examining churchy vocabulary:
eschatology
antichrist
salvation
repentance
blood
etc.
There are eighty words: one for each chapter. There are some that finally made sense to me. She is not Catholic, yet she is a Benedictine oblate. So, she is literate in Catholic sensibilities. She has preached and taught, in various venues. She is always courteous to everyone's different spiritualities. Her own experiences described in her casual writing style make the reader feel like talking to a friend. That she has become.
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