I take lots of notes, too. It takes the pressure off of thinking I *have* to re-read, although typically the more notes I take, the more likely I am to read it again. Go figure. 🙂

That title intrigued me so of course I had to go look up Silence and Beauty. 🙂 And watched a little video from Fujimura. https://vimeo.com/161220152 I may need to read this book now myself. Thanks, Michele!

Thanks, Lori. I’m a list-maker anymore so this fits right in my groove. 🙂

I do similar things, Sarah. When we go on vacation, I’ll take a backlog of Time magazines, and I’ll tear out pages of articles I want to do something with later. And pile them somewhere when I get home. A year later (or however long it takes me to clean out my junk piles!), I’ll run across them again. 🙂

Yes, looking for God in our books—or anywhere else in life—is a way we show love for him. Love hearing your story with Spinoza. It was indeed a slippery slope. 🙂 I’m glad.

Completely agree. It’s a way of loving God maybe, to look for God in literature.

For me, the most relevant “one thing” was probably when I read Spinoza’s Ethics. I’d had the book for years half thinking “the time would come” when I would read it. For various reasons the time came in early 2008. Reading Spinoza, and loving his message, somehow to gave me permission to come and read the Gospels, and not to worry about whether I “believe in God”. So I read the Gospels that summer, and again in the autumn, writing too. Well, of course it was a slippery slope, …

David