Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (1998), a Christian memoir by Kathleen Norris, tells the story of a woman who returns to church after many years away, finding a way to link her faith and Christian traditions with a contemporary world. Nominated for awards, including the 2000 Society of Midland Authors Award, the book was praised for its accessible insight into the Christian faith. Norris is a poet who grew up in a sheltered and conservative family. Amazing Grace is her third book concerning her personal journey of faith and religious rediscovery. In Amazing Grace, Norris highlights the problems she has with the contemporary church, and why she believes that young people and skeptics struggle to connect to it. She aims to help people access the church and develop their own special relationship with God. Norris, who found the church again after being absent for many years, uses her own life as an example of how anyone can join the church and find comfort in it. Norris believes that the language and ceremony used at church deter ordinary people from attending services or studying Christianity. Feeling that words such as “sin,” “evangelism,” “grace,” and “salvation” make it difficult for people to fully participate in church services, she encourages the church to use more accessible language to promote better engagement. Amazing Grace is a collection of Norris’s personal essays on this subject. Each short essay centers on a word, or a concept, that Norris believes people find intimidating, and she explains what they mean for her. She hopes that, by offering her own explanations, people can take difficult, or traditionally religious concepts and apply them to their own lives in meaningful ways. For example, in the essay, “Eschatology,” Norris explains that the dictionary definition of this word makes it hard to comprehend. Eschatology refers to time and finality, and what we believe happens at the end of things. Norris first encountered this word as a teenager while reading a religious text, and she felt intimidated by it. She didn’t see how her opinions on what the future holds can matter. However, after further reflection, Norris realized that eschatology could mean anything from the memories we reminisce over with loved ones, to the philosophy that we should live each day as if it’s our last. By connecting this obtuse word to scenarios she was more familiar with, Norris found meaning in the religious text that she couldn’t find before. At the end of each essay, she encourages us to reflect on what such words mean in our own lives, and how we can find meaning in religious works. Norris believes that to understand Christianity, we must understand its origins, and we must appreciate that its earliest concepts made sense at the time they were devised. We may be skeptical of some religious doctrines, but we must appreciate that religion changes and evolves over time. It is up to us to question, reform, and challenge religious teachings to ensure that religion remains relevant to our society. She asks us to question everything we know, or what we believe we know, about life more generally. It is humbling to realize how little we know about anything, and how much we will never understand. By questioning who we are, we can define our own existence, and work out our own place in the world. Moreover, since all the best-known monotheistic religions encourage humility and contemplation, this search gives us common ground with each other. Finding common ground and loving everyone is a Christian teaching. Again, this is an example of using contemporary thinking and spirituality to access Christian beliefs. On spirituality, Norris has much to say. She believes that, while we say society is secular, it is anything but. We are very much concerned with the spirit, the divine, and the afterlife, craving spiritual guidance. In the essay “Angels,” for example, Norris looks at how we have taken the traditional Christian concept of angels and adapted it for our own uses. Christmas cards, guardian angels, angel healing, and figurines are just some of the ways we inject spirituality into our daily lives. Through modern connections to ancient concepts, we can find our way in the Christian church. Christianity, Norris believes, allows much room for interpretation. In the penultimate essay “Truth,” she considers what it means to have faith in the unknowable, and why so many of us prefer science and tangible truths. She believes, especially in our modern world, that Christianity is flexible enough to accommodate both the knowable and the abstract; it all comes down to what we are prepared to have faith in. Amazing Grace will appeal to various readers, whether they are secular, religious, or undecided.

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Kathleen Norris

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