Experiencing Spirituality

May 26, 2014
Kurtz and Ketcham (The Spirituality of Imperfection) return after a long absence with a compendium of stories and wry life truths drawn from a variety of cultures and wisdom traditions. They quite deliberately organize their material loosely by theme, in chapters bearing such titles as "experience," "wonder," "wisdom." But they encourage the reader to dive in at random rather than read in a linear, front-to-back fashion. Readers who are conversant with brief wisdom tales from Hasidism or Zen will find many familiar ones here. What's new, though, is the sourcing and contextualizing found in the unobtrusive footnotes, which demonstrates the breadth and depth of resources the authors have drawn from. The earlier book is the more insightful; some readers may wish for a bit more from two well-known figures than their curation of familiar tales. But this will likely find an enthusiastic reception among people in addiction recovery programs and will be a good addition to public library shelves as well. Agent: Linda Loewenthal, David Black Agency.

Starred review from August 1, 2014

In this sequel to The Spirituality of Imperfections (1993), coauthors Kurtz and Ketcham present stories from a variety of countries, cultures, and religions to demonstrate how people attain enlightenment. What's particularly compelling about this work is that the authors use the relevant themes of community, forgiveness, recovery, and so on, and provide simple narratives and readable anecdotes to deliver the message. It's the kind of text in which one can pick an important topic and delve into that chapter, or read the sections randomly. VERDICT One of the best guides for applying spiritual tools to life.

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