Up for review: Discernment of Spirits, Soviet New Age, and Magic | Heterodoxology. I’ve received three books for review over the last few weeks, making for a hectic book review phase (I’m not gonna mention the ones I’m already late with). They are three fascinating collections, dealing with very diverse material. Here’s a quick preview. Angels of Light? (2012) Clare Copeland and Jan Machielsen’s Angels of Light?
(Brill, 2012) is a collection of essays dealing with that delicious problem of Christian theology and practice: how to discern real sanctity from demonic trickery? If an angel appears in all its splendour – whether in a dream, a vision, or in front of your bare eyes – how do you know that it is not the devil masquerading to lure the devout to the dark side? “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” (2 Corinthians 11:14) Paul’s warning of false apostles and false righteousness struck a special chord in the period of the European Reformations.
The New Age of Russia (2012) Defining Magic: A Reader (2013) References: Like this: The American Buddha Online Library. How Coffee Influenced The Course Of History : The Salt. Hide captionAn overseer sits in the shade while workers collect coffee beans on a Brazilian plantation, circa 1750. Hulton Archive/Getty Images Coffee is a powerful beverage. On a personal level, it helps keep us awake and active. On a much broader level, it has helped shape our history and continues to shape our culture.
Coffee plants grow wild in Ethiopia and were probably used by nomadic tribes for thousands of years, but it wasn't until the 1400s that people figured out they could roast its seeds. "Then it really took off," historian Mark Pendergrast — author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World — tells Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep. By the 1500s, he says, the drink had spread to coffeehouses across the Arab world. "It actually had a major impact on the rise of business," Pendergrast says.
The insurer Lloyd's of London was founded hundreds of years ago in one of London's 2,000 coffeehouses, he notes. Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook. By Maria Popova “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” As a lover — and keeper — of diaries and notebooks, I find myself returning again and again to the question of what compels us — what propels us — to record our impressions of the present moment in all their fragile subjectivity. From Joan Didion’s 1968 anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem (public library) — the same volume that gave us her timeless meditation on self-respect — comes a wonderful essay titled “On Keeping a Notebook,” in which Didion considers precisely that. Though the essay was originally written nearly half a century ago, the insights at its heart apply to much of our modern record-keeping, from blogging to Twitter to Instagram.
Portrait of Joan Didion by Mary Lloyd Estrin, 1977 After citing a seemingly arbitrary vignette she had found scribbled in an old notebook, Didion asks: Why did I write it down? What, then, does matter?