The Best Spiritual Writing 2010 - Softcover

Philip Zaleski is the founding editor of the Best Spiritual Writing series and the co-author, most recently, of Prayer: A History.
Pico Iyer is the author of several books about faith and crossing cultures in the modern world. His most recent book is The Open Road.

*Starred Review* Among the highlights of the latest, reliably bracing volume in editor Zaleski’s not exactly annual series are Diane Ackerman’s comments about two Jews, a pediatrician and a Hasidic rabbi, who chose to stay in the Warsaw ghetto and, despite the horror surrounding them, maintain Judaic meditation and mysticism; Seamus Heaney’s brief but lovely paean to the birch tree; Jon D. Levenson on the idea of the chosen people; the late Richard John Neuhaus on secularization theory; and Leon Wieseltier on the ineffable beauty of church bells. Some essays are spiritual in the broadest sense of the word. Nicholas Carr wonders whether Google is making us stupid (“The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”). Google’s founders, he reminds us, say their goal is to turn the search engine into an artificial intelligence surpassing the HAL computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey and, presumably, take a big chunk of our humanity from us in the process. Finally, the late John Updike is represented by a poignant essay on the writer in winter. In addition, quite a few poets’ work appears, including Mary Jo Bang’s translation of the first canto of Dante’s Inferno and poems by Billy Collins, Louise Glück, Jane Hirshfield, Philip Levine, Robert Pinsky, Melissa Range, Floyd Skloot, and Richard Wilbur. --June Sawyers