The curmudgeonly old are notorious for “close-mindedness, complaining, fear of change, obsessing about comfort and security, boredom, denial, resentment, judgmentalism, hoarding, and cursing an increasingly unfamiliar world.” But the latter years of life don’t have to be this way, and Huston points the reader in another direction.
On the Shelf
Straphanger
Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile
Taras Grescoe is a straphanger: he prefers and relies on public transportation for day-to-day travel. He’s not hesitant to use a car occasionally, but he’d rather be on a train, bicycle or just on foot.
Occupy Religion
Theology of the Multitude
By Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan Rowman and Littlefield
It is easy to conclude that the Occupy movement was a flash in the pan, enacted by disgruntled people without a plan or staying power, a passing whim to be forgotten. This book insists otherwise.
Christian Wiman and Don Share have put together a memorable collection of poetry drawn from Poetry magazine’s venerable history. This wide-ranging, eclectic anthology puts its finger on the pulse of 20th-century American poetry. It includes famous poems like T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.
My Lenten practice has almost involved some kind of endurance. As a child I usually gave up something like chocolate or sweets. My practice evolved into committing to walk to the grocery store or buy nothing but food or, one year, give up plastic.
But regardless of what I took on or gave up, I have always intended for this to last through all of Lent. The practice ends—or finds a new form—at Holy Week, and the endurance test ends with it.
This year, Lent has an entirely different rhythm for me—because of a book by writer and Benedictine oblate Paula Huston.
