[Oe List ...] a book announcement

[Ann Avery]

Greetings everyone!

I wanted to let you know that Desmond has written a book which grew out of his study of Simone Weil, the French philosopher-activist-mystic who died in 1943, described by Camus as 'the only great spirit of our time.' It is Beyond Power: Simone Weil and the Notion of Authority, and is published by Lexington Books. The acknowledgments conclude :   

Finally, warm thanks are also due to former colleagues in the Ecumenical Institute of Chicago, 
who should take the credit for many of the insights and methods I have drawn on for this work. You can find the first chapter at www.lexingtonbooks (Desmond Avery, samples; and while you are there you can read the "expert reviews"!)  I have copied part of it below.  

Thanks and blessings to all of you, 
Ann

from the first chapter :... there is another kind of story, whichthis book does try to tell. It is the sequence of concerns expressed in a two thousand-year-old text that is still quite widely known, as the Lord's Prayeror the Our Father. Weil discovered this set of words in Greek two years beforeshe died, while studying Matthew's gospel with Gustave Thibon. Theprayer consists of an invocation followed by six petitions,3 which she saw ascontaining everything anyone could  meaningfully hope or beg for from theuniverse or from the silence beyond it. The content of the present study isarranged in the same order as the clauses of the prayer, starting with the ideaof what characterizes all that we find to be most importantly true and good,and invoking this aspect of reality. It leads to the question of religion, exploredhere mainly as reverence for what is seen as representing sacred truths;then politics, in terms of what reigns or should reign; then science, seen as thestudy of what the truth reflected in the  laws of necessity causes to be done onearth as it is in outer space. Those are known as the "you" petitions. They arefollowed by the "us" petitions, which are for nourishment, seen here in thecontext of work; forgiveness, in the context here of justice; and deliverancefrom being misguided, in the context here of education. To put it all like that is to try not so much to evade the narrowly religiousaccretions of the whole idea of prayer as to ask what realities in anyone's lifesuch formulae attempt to come to terms with.
 
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