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The author's message is that there are sicknesses and brokenness that cause people to behave in destructive ways, but in the eyes of God there are no truly bad people, ever. He is not shut away from the real world, either, but has spent his life creating the largest ministry to assist former gang members to try to turn their lives around, and has seen hundreds of his community die from overdose, chronic health problems, or violence. His previous book Tattoos on the Heart is on my list of books to be read. Through a family connection I knew about the work the author was doing before we wrote his two books.

He follows a faith tradition informed by mystic and contemplatives going back hundreds of years at the same time living alongside the kinds of challenges the modern world throws marginalized communities. These include the Covid19 pandemic, extremist racism, and a widening wealth gap. I admit I am not myself fully on board with his radical embrace of even the most sadistic and notorious menaces to society but am willing to accept that he must know a lot more about life among people susceptible to gang influence than I could imagine.

At the present time, the enterprise is being run by those it has raised up, and the author is now able to spend most of his time doing national outreach to spread the word about what they have accomplished. Many of the anecdotes involve long distance plane travel by himself with two of the Homeboy community members, who oftentimes have never ventured from the east Los Angeles area where they grew up. He guides them on how to speak in front of a group of strangers who belong to very different cultures, and how to make sense of the way the rest of us deal with the quirks of travel. He doesn't make fun of anyone, but chooses the stories which illuminate what is happening within the hearts of those who have been pulled into gang life but managed to extract themselves with the help of those who cherished them and made them feel that they belonged.

Other stories are set at the Homeboy Industries headquarters where the day-to-day is unlike any other agency I've encountered. We learn what they look for in a prospective trainee making their first steps away from gang life, how they deal with relapses, when they have to tell a trainee that they are not ready to continue. Incarceration and re-entry to the outside world are frequent motifs. The language and details of life on the edge can both get pretty spicy, so if this is a deal-breaker for the reader, this may not be the best book to pick up for them. But if you are looking for an account of life in the shadow of gang violence which isn't sugar-coated, this could be a perfect read.

What the author says is that there are no bad people, full stop. Anyone who commits a heinous act or who expresses hateful opinions or generally makes life worse for people around them is acting contrary to what's in their own best life. For the author, this is a symptom of an inner sickness rather than an evil character, and the best response is to do whatever one can to bring the person back to wellness. This is the function of the Homeboy Industries communities where they live out a message of love to give people who have been raised with hardship a model they can follow. It doesn't mean you never get to feel angry at someone for their behavior or to grieve when they do not live up to your hopes. still, I think to really feel this way in among the residents of the depressed inner city must take some kind of sainthood because of all the cognitive dissonance you have to dispel within yourself. Also, it feels like there can be all sorts of philosophical arguments about what it really means to have no bad people anywhere in the world, as though the term "bad" might simply have been redefined away. Still, I recognize that it can serve a spiritual purpose to live as though the saying were true.

I enjoyed hearing Fr. Greg narrate his own book so he could apply just the right twist to a phrase, or spring one of the many jokes using the gift of timing. And the same goes for the sharpness of the pain that comes across when he recalls a tragedy experienced by one of the Homeboy trainees or their loved ones (he mentions having held nearly 300 funerals in the community over the years). It is an extraordinary account I chose for this year's Advent reading.

In this book, it is not the author's intention to come up with a single correct formulation of what happens after death. He gives a summary of what the source documents state and lets the reader decide what to accept or reject. The one stance he takes is against uninformed preaching and writing which rely on misunderstandings of what the historical record contains. I believe he sees himself as one who applies methods used by historians to interpret primary sources to infer what people believed at the time they were recorded. He does not venture into doctrine or philosophy of religion.

There is no one place that sets forth what the afterlife will be like and what milestones, but only scattered bits through the various sources. All of this literature was developed long before the formulation of creeds and confessions which is what the majority of Christian churches now use to decide who is an adherent and who is not.

We start out with a chapter discussing the development of thoughts during recorded history about what happens around death, at least in the Near East. There's a theme that runs through here which is puzzling out the relationship between an individual's body and soul : After death, does the body return to life in some form, or does only the soul persist, or are both lost?

Because Israel was part of the Greek-speaking world during the time of the New Testament we take a side excursion to see what the great philosophers of ancient Greece thought. In the last three-quarters of the book the author takes a look at all the passages in the Bible touching on the disposition of a human being at the point of death and afterwards, going back to the original Hebrew and and Greek. It's quite a stretch of time where you cannot say that the Judeo-Christian tradition decrees one picture only. There is a spectrum of ideas, ranging from blank nothingness at the time of death, to an afterlife where shades experience very little, to one where there may be specific places where the soul with or without the body is subjected to treatment that depends on how they conducted themselves during life. But the other big influence considered is a desire for accountability of the individual according to how faithful they were to their beliefs during life.

The portion where he talks about ideas during Jesus's time and afterwards is interesting because not only does he look at the New Testament we know about but also books not accepted as canonical. The main message was that there was no consensus on these matters among Christians. The Book of Revelation is the most well-known piece of apocalyptic writing but not the only one from this time. The others have strikingly different takes on what happens after death. The author takes the view takes the view that Jesus and other historical figures belonged to an apocalyptic community that foresaw an end of all things coming soon. As years passed and this did not happen, this started to become a crisis as they tried to account for what this meant for all the other beliefs.

I liked the way he presented it in a neutral, factual way without bias in a way that non-experts can understand. He has written many other books on religious studies which I would be interested to read in the future. I like having all of the material in an even-handed way so I can work out what my own belief is.

This book is a combination of creative non-fiction talking of the author's own experience going on walks of different sorts along with a historical study of the place of walking in culture. I don't know how she was able to dig up so many disparate references to walking, hiking, touring, strolling, marching, in every conceivable setting as depicted by so many different sources from around the world. It was kind of dazzling to listen to all these essays stemming from different aspects of one simple action. We are reminded how tough it is for a toddler to learn how to master walking at the beginning of life. Although it seems that the act of walking, available to nearly of all of us, has been relegated to a niche role in our mechanized culture, she makes a convincing case for how it still affects our thinking and well-being. Health, economic, political, spiritual and other dimensions are considered.

There are extended discussions of the great walkers of the Enlightenment, political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and poet William Wordsworth who shifted the way walking was thought of. The author describes how city streets in Europe were once both semi-private, semi-public places to walk. Some people relied on the streets to earn their living, notably sex workers, who had to face attempts to regulate who was allowed to travel in the city, where, and when.

It's hard to think of a more artificial place to navigate by foot than the Las Vegas Strip with its casinos and spectacles, subject of the last chapter. This feels like a world apart from the walking pilgrimages of visitors to the old shrine at Chimayó, New Mexico, or the late 20th century activists who crossed the width of the United States to bring attention to some political cause. In an earlier chapter I was interested to learn of the the performance artists Martina Abramović and Ulay whose piece entitled "Lovers" involved their walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, meeting and interacting with local people who heard about their project, to meet up at the middle, only for the two of them to separate. Walking the thousands of kilometers feels relevant to the meaning of the art.

It is appropriate that I consumed much of this book in audiobook form while walking around my neighborhood. It felt as though I could absorb it better by moving my own legs.

This is a light entertainment told in 31 chapters, one for each day of October. The author plays with characters from a number of stories and legends setting them and their animal companions in a game that decides whether ruin comes to the Earth every few decades or so. Much of the story is told in dialogue as experienced by the hound Snuff who can speak with his sorcerous master Jack the after midnight only. The talk is about magic artifacts, about closers and openers, leading up to a climax on Halloween night according to how the players have conducted themselves up to this point. In the course of the novel, there are attacks and killings shifting the balance, but also friendships and enmity. The author's style is to suggest things without spelling them out openly, to keep the reader's interest. Deceptions keep the story lively too, along with the black and white line drawings by the late Gahan Wilson in his inimitable style. One of the chapters is an homage to one of the worlds invented by H. P. Lovecraft and there are a few other references to entities of his mythos throughout. On the 31st there is the big showdown with a couple of twists I didn't see coming, and an abrupt ending.

I was glad to have been able to read this during the month of October as a number fans have done year after year, but I think fans of experimental fantasy can enjoy this at any time.

I pre-ordered this book when I heard it was coming out. It's a little bit different from this author's previous three books in that it focuses mainly on the relationship between two male characters, the brothers Peter and Ivan. The two of them are working through the grief caused by recent death of their father, along with their issues concerning dominance along with a little streak of violence. The main secondary relationships are between the two brothers and their romantic partners. Peter had a long-term relationship end unexpectedly after his girlfriend Sylvia suffered injuries in an accident and current girlfriend Naomi who is about 10 years younger than he. Between the confusion with the two girlfriends and his work stresses and his recent grief he's taken to taking pills and drinking to excess. Younger brother Ivan is a high-ranking chess player who meets a woman during a an exhibition game and immediately has a relationship with her even though she's about 14 years older than him. This woman Margaret has a separation from her husband because of mental issues of his own, but the arrangement has not been formalized. This set up a sort of a parallel structure between the two mismatched age relationships of Peter and Naomi on the one hand and Margaret and Ivan on the other. All of these characters are drawn with some degree of sympathy and also with a careful attention to their various shortcomings and faults .In one of these there's much more of a power imbalance than in the other.

Much of the story is told in in the form of dialogue, along with quite a few long unbroken paragraphs of stream of consciousness prose experienced via the point of view of one of the major characters. Within one of these paragraphs there may be inner thoughts, bits of dialogue, random observations, stated intentions for action, or details of description, all mixed together. At times their unfiltered interior monologue is at odds with the character's speech or action. It's hard not to notice the similarities and differences between this author's use of that technique and the ones who first pioneered it in the early 20th century.

The tone is realistic and the bits of narration are relatively matter of fact. There are a number of scenes of a sexual nature for all of the couples, presented in the author's trademark style of dispassionate description. I think these scenes are for a mature reader, but don't require strong trigger warnings. They are important for story reasons, not gratuitous, depicting character, and providing key plot points. There is one scene of physical violence between the brothers, too, but it is relatively restrained. When it happens the reader is left wondering whether it constitutes a final rupture in relations between the two or not but and by the end of the story things are sorted out. To me the motif about love relationships across age boundaries seemed rather mildly transgressive, if anything, but perhaps it is a matter of a slightly different culture from mine. It felt to me as though the way this novel ended featured muted fireworks compared to some of the author's other books. Here there are confrontations and some strong feelings expressed, but in the end everything just gets smoothed out. I think some other readers might prefer to see higher stakes. By the end I was wondering whether some of the novelist's decisions were colored by human interactions compared to a chess game, with sacrifices, risks taken, plans on top of other plans depending on what one's adversary is going to do. The analogy is not perfect in that people will hide what their doing in ways chess doesn't allow, unlike a game like poker.

As an epilogue, the author lays forth the many literary borrowings and illusions that she managed to incorporated into the text. It was as though she did not want to lift these lines without acknowledging them and being called out for it. There are a few other details in the book that felt as though they might play a bigger role in ratcheting up the tension, things that seemed as though they were going to constitute a subplot, but which ultimately led to no big payoff. When one of the characters mused upon feelings regarding self-harm I did not take them too seriously. I will dock the book a star for not being quite as daring as it could have been, but I'm still glad I read it.