[Oe List ...] a book announcement

[Paula Philbrook]

The link needs a .com on the end.

www.lexingtonbooks.com

Paula


On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 1:24 AM, Ann Avery <annharrisonavery at btinternet.com>
wrote:

>
> 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 w*ork*.*
>
> 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, which*
>
> *this 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 Prayer*
>
> *or the Our Father. Weil discovered this set of words in Greek two years before*
>
> *she died, while studying Matthew's gospel with Gustave Thibon. The*
>
> *prayer consists of an invocation followed by six petitions,3 which she saw as*
>
> *containing everything anyone could  meaningfully hope or beg for from the*
>
> *universe or from the silence beyond it. The content of the present study is*
>
> *arranged in the same order as the clauses of the prayer, starting with the idea*
>
> *of 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, explored*
>
> *here 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 the*
>
> *study of what the truth reflected in the  laws of necessity causes to be done on*
>
> *earth as it is in outer space. Those are known as the "you" petitions. They are*
>
> *followed by the "us" petitions, which are for nourishment, seen here in the*
>
> *context of work; forgiveness, in the context here of justice; and deliverance*
>
> *from being misguided, in the context here of education. *
>
> *To put it all like that is to try not so much to evade the narrowly religious*
>
> *accretions of the whole idea of prayer as to ask what realities in anyone's life*
>
> *such formulae attempt to come to terms with.*
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OE mailing list
> OE at wedgeblade.net
> http://wedgeblade.net/mailman/listinfo/oe_wedgeblade.net
>
>


-- 
Paula
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wedgeblade.net/pipermail/oe_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20080703/77ffe5f7/attachment-0001.html