The Tao of Physics

The mystics explore it through meditation.  The nuclear physicists explore it through experimentation and hypothesis.  It's the universe as we understand it today, a "cosmic dance" of paradoxical yet unified relationships -- an organic vision brilliantly evoked by a gifted and thoughtful physicist.

"Mystics understand the roots of the Tao but not its branches; scientists understand its branches but not its roots.  Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science; but man needs both." -- Fritjof Capra in The Tao of Physics

This is the first edition of this book from 1975, during the rush to New Age philosophy.  Capra spends the first portion of the book explaining to the layman quantum physics and relativity of modern physics without mathematics.  He then provides an overview of eastern religion/philosophy.  Given these two introductions, Capra moves forward on seek to correlate the two; very poorly I believe.

I was very disappointed in this book.  I should have gotten a philosophy text of eastern philosophy and made the connections myself being a physicist.  Leaving mathematics out of physics is like telling a story without words.  Though one might be able to correlate eastern mystical philosophy to some aspects of modern physics, it does not help the understanding of either nor reveal any new truth.

I felt like I had wasted my time reading this text.  I am very glad that this was given to me by someone who also spent nothing for the book.  If you want to know about modern physics, read any book by Hawking.  If you want to know about eastern philosophy, get an eastern philosophy book.

The Lamb's Supper

Of all things Catholic, there is nothing that is so familiar as the Mass. With its unchanging prayers, the Mass fits Catholics like their favorite clothes. Yet most Catholics sitting in the pews on Sundays fail to see the powerful supernatural drama that enfolds them. Pope John Paul II described the Mass as "Heaven on Earth," explaining that what "we celebrate on Earth is a mysterious participation in the heavenly liturgy."

The Lamb’s Supper reveals a long-lost secret of the Church: The early Christians' key to understanding the mysteries of the Mass was the New Testament Book of Revelation. With its bizarre imagery, its mystic visions of heaven, and its end-of-time prophecies, Revelation mirrors the sacrifice and celebration of the Eucharist.

Beautifully written, in clear direct language, bestselling Catholic author Scott Hahn's new book will help readers see the Mass with new eyes, pray the liturgy with a renewed heart, and enter into the Mass more fully, enthusiastically, intelligently, and powerfully than ever before.

This book was loaned to me by a western rights friend.  (I refuse to use the term "Catholic" with an adjective given the word's meaning.)  Not being of the western rights liturgy, I was not of the intended audience of the book.  I was not familiar with the Mass liturgy, so there is likely great information that I did not gather any knowledge from.  I do think Dr. Hahn wrote an excellent text concerning and supporting his understanding of the Mass.  He did help me as a Protestant understand my differences with my western rights and Orthodox brothers and sisters.  I do not have strong theological arguments with them.  My differences are strictly philosophical.

My western and eastern rights brothers and sisters focus heavily on the importance of the history of church liturgy.  The Mass and its connection with the Revelation is a chicken and egg argument, i.e., did the early Church fathers pattern their new method of worship after the Revelation or does the Revelation reveal the meaning of the Mass?  Dr. Hahn does not discuss this conundrum.  He assumes the second by axiom.

Since this is my blog, you get my thoughts on this subject.  I believe that this new method of worship that the Lord said nothing about was patterned after what the early church fathers knew: Judisim.  As the Church has grown and taken on other cultural histories, worship today looks different across the earth.  Is that wrong?  I believe not.  If the pattern of worship was important to the Lord, I believe He would have spoken on it.  Dr. Hahn quotes extensively from the Revelation because that is the focus of his text.  I am certain of his knowledge of the Scripture, but there are two I will quote that I believe ends the argument.

For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift — not from works, so that no one can boast. 

Ephesians 2:8-9

For freedom, Christ set us free. Stand firm then and don’t submit again to a yoke of slavery. 

Galatians 5:1

Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief

When a loved one dies we mourn our loss. We take comfort in the rituals that mark the passing, and we turn to those around us for support. But what happens when there is no closure, when a family member or a friend who may be still alive is lost to us nonetheless? How, for example, does the mother whose soldier son is missing in action, or the family of an Alzheimer's patient who is suffering from severe dementia, deal with the uncertainty surrounding this kind of loss?

In this sensitive and lucid account, Pauline Boss explains that, all too often, those confronted with such ambiguous loss fluctuate between hope and hopelessness. Suffered too long, these emotions can deaden feeling and make it impossible for people to move on with their lives. Yet the central message of this book is that they can move on. Drawing on her research and clinical experience, Boss suggests strategies that can cushion the pain and help families come to terms with their grief. Her work features the heartening narratives of those who cope with ambiguous loss and manage to leave their sadness behind, including those who have lost family members to divorce, immigration, adoption, chronic mental illness, and brain injury. With its message of hope, this eloquent book offers guidance and understanding to those struggling to regain their lives.

This book was given to me as a gift.  The book is focused on those dealing with the ambiguity of a missing loved one or a loved one with a psychological disease.  I have neither or family with either.  Boss does briefly consider one or the family of one dealing with a degenerative physical illness.  Boss does cover well and in detail the needs and troubles of those dealing with family with the former illnesses.  She really doesn't cover the family with the latter.  Her experiences in therapy with the former.  I wished the book also covered those dealing with the ongoing loss of physical ability.

The Pope Who Would Be King

Description
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Pope and Mussolini takes on a pivotal, untold story: the bloody revolution that stripped the pope of political power and signaled the birth of modern Europe.

Days after his prime minister was assassinated in the middle of Rome in November 1848, Pope Pius IX found himself a virtual prisoner in his own palace. The wave of revolution that had swept through Europe now seemed poised to put an end to the popes’ thousand-year reign over the Papal States, if not to the papacy itself. Disguising himself as a simple parish priest, Pius escaped through a back door. Climbing inside the Bavarian ambassador’s carriage, he embarked on a journey into a fateful exile.

Only two years earlier Pius’s election had triggered a wave of optimism across Italy. After the repressive reign of the dour Pope Gregory XVI, Italians saw the youthful, benevolent new pope as the man who would at last bring the Papal States into modern times and help create a new, unified Italian nation. But Pius found himself caught between a desire to please his subjects and a fear—stoked by the conservative cardinals—that heeding the people’s pleas would destroy the church. The resulting drama—with a colorful cast of characters, from Louis Napoleon and his rabble-rousing cousin Charles Bonaparte to Garibaldi, Tocqueville, and Metternich—was rife with treachery, tragedy, and international power politics.

David Kertzer is one of the world’s foremost experts on the history of Italy and the Vatican and has a rare ability to bring history vividly to life. With a combination of gripping, cinematic storytelling and keen historical analysis, rooted in an unprecedented richness of archival sources, The Pope Who Would Be King sheds fascinating new light on the end of rule by divine right in the west and the emergence of modern Europe.

This is likely one of the best history texts that I have ever read.  The author paints such a clear picture of the events and people involved that it read like a novel.  Though I knew the outcome of the events I still had hope and anticipation for the conclusion.  Very well done.  I highly recommend