Easter Everywhere, Darcey Steinke
More for my reference than anything else, but this book sounds completely fascinating, possibly a good barometer on the culture.
A few quotes from the Times’ Sunday Book Review:
Such a childhood is chockablock with potential grievances, but not one gram of score-settling poisons Steinke’s memory. Instead she admires her father for having practiced his cultish, peacenik version of Lutheranism as long as he did . . . Steinke doesn’t even particularly ask him to have been a better father. The real issue seems to be that he infused her with religiosity without providing her with a workable theology, an intellectual framework with which to understand, or at least abide, the central contradictions of Christianity. If God exists, she asks her father, why does he allow so much suffering? “Ah,” he responds unhelpfully. “The $64,000 question.”
When Steinke does settle on a provisional creed, it’s one of touchy-feely meta-beliefs that fail to honor the depth of her own longing. These she palms off on her daughter, and they’re no more nourishing than the chocolate her father stopped her mouth with when she once asked about God’s sufferance of evil. “Everybody has their own theology” and “You decide what you want to believe” sound more like an anomie hangover from the 70s than the result of grueling spiritual self-examination, and are likely to leave her own child as much of a dazed pilgrim as she was.
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