John P. Keenan

Blueberry Fool

“Thom Rock's Blueberry Fool is, I think, best read alone and aloud. Alone, because it invites to memory that is deeper than reminiscence. Aloud, because its crafted words are viscerally arresting. Rock encourages his reader to plunge into memories of meaning beyond the obvious. Just as Augustine saw memory, not as simply recovering past facts, but as leading toward the deepest insights, so Rock teases language to recapture the inchoate tastes and sounds of lived life. Berries and birds, fireflies and hummingbirds flicker through these pages, enticing the reader to mine the depths of the past experiences that make us who we are, of hopes adumbrated in memory and inscribed in a faith that abides in the unstable stability of questioning what those experiences mean. Rock's meditations, grounded as they are in backyard paths through blueberry fields, remind one of the evocations of nature in Matsuo Bash_'s haiku poetry, or the ecological visions of Aldo Leopold's Sand Country Almanac. These words are to be savored-like Rock's preserved berries and pickled cucumbers in midwinter. Read his meditations slowly, attentive to the flavor of words that call forth the memories from which we have constructed our sense of who we are and how we embrace faith-not as adhered belief but as the embodiment and reflection of our own lived experiences. If someday we get to hang out with sympathetic souls in heaven, I believe that Thom Rock will likely find himself in the company of Augustine, Bash_, and Leopold.”

Experiencing Scripture in World Religions

World Religions

“This volume of essays sketches the role of authoritative scriptures in a number of religious traditions and insightfully shows how they become embodied in the lives of their practitioners.”

Interfaith Activism

World Religions

“Abraham Joshua Heschel's life and writings model a deep commitment to his own Jewish tradition, the depths of which enabled him to reach out, understand, and engage other faith traditions. He avoids both easy universalism and sectarian pride through his personal commitment to Torah, allowing him to set a model for others in a radical openness to other faiths that emerges from a Judaism that plumbs the depths to construct a broad and wide space for interreligious understanding and cooperation.”

Opening New Horizons

World Religions

“Perhaps the chief insight of Joseph Raab’s Opening New Horizons is his focus. Avoiding both thick postmodern approaches that focus on subsets of the traditions as well as any detached comparisons of ‘Buddhism’ vis-à-vis ‘Christianity,’ Raab offers a Merton horizon familiar to many, a horizon opening into insights beyond either the opacity of localized expressions or the overarching examinations of themes and doctrines that would first choose the fundamentals and then focus on their relationship, whether convergent or disparate. The very first sentence rejects dichotomous thinking, citing Pope Francis. Especially to be prized is Raab’s fulsome treatment of the interchanges between Merton and D. T. Suzuki, the most thorough and best account I have read.”