13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reaching for the Invisible God, September 21, 2009
This review is from: God Hides in Plain Sight: How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World (Paperback)
In his 1933 essay, "The End of Our Time," Nicholas Berdyaev writes: "Two attitudes, two completely divergent positions, are possible for man, and he finds the face of everything different accordingly as he chooses the one or the other. He can --- if he will --- put himself in the presence of God and the mystery of being. Then he has a clear conscience and a clean heart, revelation and intuition are vouchsafed to him, the true primordial spirit appears, he reaches to the very source of all."
It is precisely this posture toward reality and experience that Dean Nelson endorses in his new book: "God Hides in Plain Sight." Nelson, who reminds me of Leonard Sweet in person --- brilliant, quick on his feet, enormously well read --- writes here with the poetic grace of Anne Lamott or Thomas Merton, exploring the mystery and the meaning of Divine presence in everyday moments.
By day, Nelson writes op-ed pieces in The New York Times and other venues while leading the journalism department at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. Yet in these pages he writes from a philosophical perspective. Using a skeletal outline from the Christian sacraments, Nelson traces the tiny, often unobserved specks of DNA evidence that establish God's paternity amid His creation, teaching us to be more attentive as we experience family, community and society.
Woven through these well-crafted pages are quotes from Henri Nouwen, Walter Wangerin, Frederick Buechner and others, including novelist Walker Percy. The result is a collection of tightly-written essays that command the reader's notice while rewarding it with perceptive and intriguing depth.
With this book, Nelson places himself among the first tier of contemporary thinkers, challenging us to address the critical questions of life by becoming more attentive to daily graces.
Dr. David Frisbie
The Center for Marriage & Family Studies
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I know the author, April 7, 2010
This review is from: God Hides in Plain Sight: How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World (Paperback)
So in the interest of fair disclosure, I know the author and think he is a great guy. Nonetheless, I am writing this because I truly loved his book and not to be polite. I found this book both both highly readable and profound. I enjoyed the stories, anecdotes, and quotes from other deep thinkers. More than that I loved the deeper sense of intimacy I felt with God after experiencing this book. This book was so good, I loaned it to a friend who was in agony she couldn't highlight and write in it. Needless to say, I went out and bought a copy for her. I hope you like it also.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
God doesn't play hide and seek., February 5, 2011
This review is from: God Hides in Plain Sight: How to See the Sacred in a Chaotic World (Paperback)
In his 1992 film Husbands and Wives, Woody Allen's character watches television, as a scientist quotes Einstein, "God doesn't play with dice." Allen turns the TV off and walks away, "No he doesn't play with dice. He plays hide and seek."
Nelson takes strong exception to the notion that God plays hide and seek with the universe. Rather, God constantly breaks in. We simply fail to recognize it, just as the natives on the southern tip of Argentina assumed that Magellan's ships were apparitions because they lacked the experience to decode the event. The book attempts to show us how to see God in the world and in our lives. He draws from mostly Catholic authors--Thomas Merton figures prominently--in an attempt to persuade us that spiritual discernment is not a "Where's Waldo" exercise but a discipline of prayer.
The central difficulty with the book is the use of the seven sacraments as touchstones in his analysis of how God breaks in and constantly reveals himself. Our Catholic parish book group recently read this book. I expressed my curiosity that an evangelical Protestant would take such an approach. The primary reference point of the Reformation is an "individualist" concept of grace that can cause some to lose contact with the senses and the social sphere. Protestantism is suspicious of any "pagan" tendencies, so it avoids festivals, ceremonies, rites and all "sense oriented" religious tendencies. Grace is mediated solely through the preaching of the word, interior conversion and pure doctrine.
The distinguishing feature of modern evangelical Protestantism is "decisionism" which, roughly speaking, means that a Christian is one who has made "a decision for Christ" or has accepted Christ as his/her personal Savior. The believer makes only one decision, a once-and-for-all event, before which the sinner is damned and after which the sinner is saved. Decisionism is a relatively new concept that many scholars attribute to Charles Finney (1792-1875), a professor of theology at Yale, who formulated an earlier version of it in the 1820s. Although the concept was highly controversial in its day and was attacked as superficial, it has held sway and is the cornerstone of modern evangelical Protestantism. Decisionists are peculiarly individualistic. They are typically suspicious of sacraments as detracting from the centrality of the "decision for Christ." Indeed, Nelson tells us that he grew up in a church in which communion was celebrated twice a year. Therefore, it is odd that this book would emerge from the evangelical community.
Others in our group found that the book was not only "odd" or "curious" but downright annoying. Several suggested that it is clear that Nelson understands little about many of the sacraments. This chapter on "Last Rites" essentially missed the point. Other than a cute story about his evangelical protestant father-in-law being asked in a Catholic hospital whether he wanted to see a priest, the chapter says nothing about the sacrament. Rather, the chapter is a discussion about the sad treatment of death and dying in our culture. That's fine, but why did he have to link it with "last rites," which isn't even the real name of the sacrament? Similar criticisms could be lodged against his treatment of the other sacraments. Several members of the group visibly winced when passages from the chapter entitled "The Sacrament of Communion" were read aloud.
In a rejoinder to these criticisms, Msgr. Dennis L. Mikulanis, a Catholic priest says that "Nelson is not writing about the theology of the sacraments. He is writing about the description of sacramentality, which can loosely be defined as `seeing the grace of God in the everyday moments of life.'" (North County Times, March 19, 2010) Why, then, mention the sacraments at all? Many in our group argued that the book will only confuse both Catholics and Orthodox who are poorly educated about their faith as well as Protestants who see the sacramental system as a strange syncretistic pagan gloss on the gospel.
One member of the group suggested that Nelson's notions of spiritual discernment could be improved by a study of St. Ignatius of Loyola's works on the subject. Perhaps Nelson could benefit from a Jesuit spiritual director.
Our group gave the book a mixed review. The book invites us to reject Woody Allen, turn off the television, and see God in the workings of our ordinary lives. It uses various stories to illustrate how that can happen. But the treatment of the sacraments misses many essential points and may promote confusion on both sides of the sad historical divide of Christianity.
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