Quote of the Day

"Never let it be said that I don't lead people to have second thoughts."


-Elmer Pierre, infamous bookseller

This Guy Makes Me Want to Shave My Head and Get Smarter

Austin Dacey just finished reading upstairs at Nina's, and it was a great event. He's a very eloquent speaker and it's easy to see just how passionate he is about his subject matter both from the passages he read from The Secular Conscience and in his thoughtful responses to audience questions.

When Mr. Dacey's next book comes out, we will gladly have him back to read. If you didn't get a chance to attend this event, I'd highly recommend tracking him down if you are in any of the cities on his book tour.

Literary Magazines in MN

Writer and performer Stephanie Wilber Ash (who will be reading with Geoff Herbach at CGB on June 12) wrote a nice article on literary magazines in Minnesota, though she only listed InDigest Magazine, rather than interview the upstanding gentlemen who produce that magazine. Even after they published her good friend and Electric Arc cohort, Sam Osterhout. Despite this transgression it's a good article and a good introduction to lit mags in the state.

Read the article here>>

For having a small magazine section, we have a pretty good selection of lit mags at CGB, including two mentioned in the article--Conduit and Elysian Fields.









Other lit mags you'll find at CGB:

• Tin House
• Knockout
• The Baffler
• Willow Springs
• Great River Review
• VQR (Virginia Quarterly Review)
• The Kenyon Review
  
• Light

If you have any suggestions or lit mags you'd like to see in the store, let us know by commenting on this post.

Catherine Friend on The Compassionate Carnivore

In advance of her upcoming event at the Virginia Street Swedenborgian Church on Wednesday, April 30th, we asked the Hit by a Farm author to talk a bit about her new book, The Compassionate Carnivore.

Humans have been eating meat since our ancestors began the fairly creepy practice called kleptoparasitism. Basically, we’d let the more skilled predators like lions, leopards, and other clawed beasts chase down and kill the prey, then after some hard-working panther had stashed his dead gazelle in a tree, we’d climb up and steal it.

Gross.

Luckily, our meat now comes so neatly packaged in shrink wrap that we can easily forget we’re eating an animal. But then about 30 years ago those pesky animal rights activists began chanting “Factory farming is bad for animals and eating animals is bad.” The only part of that mantra that stuck in my head was “eating animals is bad,” but since I wasn’t going to give up meat, all I acquired was a healthy dose of guilt about my cuisine.

As a farmer who raises meat, I like that people keep eating meat. But as one who cares about animals, I’ve come to the really uncomfortable conclusion that those unrelenting activists were right about one thing: Factory farming is bad for the animals.

So what’s a carnivore to do? Are there any choices between giving up meat entirely and assuaging our guilt with a 16 ounce prime rib, medium rare?

I think so, which is why I wrote The Compassionate Carnivore, Or, How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat. The book looks at animals, their lives, why those lives are worthy of our consideration as meat-eaters, and how we might change our meat-eating habits to reflect that.

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What The Vatican Didn't Say About The New Deadly Sins by Austin Dacey

You may have heard that the Catholic Church recently released an upgrade to the Seven Deadly Sins. Appropriate to the age of globalization and biotechnology, the new list includes such supposed social vices as contributing to extreme poverty, accumulating extreme wealth, trafficking in or consuming hard drugs, despoiling the environment, and engaging in "morally debatable experiments" or "genetic manipulation." I applaud the move insofar as it signifies that the moral imagination of the Catholic leadership is finally moving beyond concupiscence. Everyone I know has been angry, proud, envious, greedy, lustful, gluttonous or slothful at least once in the last month. But most of us have not trafficked in hard drugs or modified a genome. So by doubling the number of sins, the Church may have inadvertantly made most of us 50 percent less sinful overnight! The episode also illustrates one of the main themes of my book, The Secular Conscience, that morality cannot be equated with any list of "Shall"s and "Shall Not"s since a list cannot anticipate future moral quandries, and a list cannot tell you why you should follow it rather than some other list. For that we need conscience.

Reason, Faith, and Storytelling by Jon Spayde

There’s an argument going on in America about the “reasonableness” of faith. A quartet of “neo-atheist” authors, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett, have argued against religion, and the faith in God that underpins religion. Their primary claim is that faith and religion are irrational because God is a delusion. (They have much more to say, too, of course, about what they see as the dangers and deficiencies of religion.) “Believing” authors have responded with defenses of the reasonableness of what the neo-atheists attack.
My book, How to Believe, is a “believer’s” book of a different sort. I’m a journalist, not a philosopher or a theologian, and what I tried to do with the 34 profiles of Christian believers in the book was not to prove something about religion or God but rather to tell the stories of belief and find out how believers deal with the admittedly strange things asserted in scripture and doctrine: a man who is God, a God who is One in Three, and so forth. I wrote as one pulled toward faith but not fully certain, aware of an immensity beyond this world but not comfortable with pat explanations of it, deeply respectful of science but dubious about the capacity of the five senses of one erect-walking primate (even augmented by powerful instruments) to fully and finally explain the universe.
My interviewees mostly came to faith because of powerful experiences, not convincing arguments. They did their best to understand these experiences, and for them religious tradition offered accounts of them that were eloquent and convincing, but not always in the strict terms of logic. I was struck by how often they rejected both mere rationality and mere anti-rationality, opting instead for an attitude of respectful awe before the universe. Prayer and meditation testified to a desire for a change of consciousness, a going-deeper into the mystery, not necessarily a clear and final certainty. They, like me, were and are “on the path.”
Are religious people the only ones who can possess this desire, the only ones who can feel this awe? Of course not. And I wouldn’t dream of denying the horrors perpetrated by religious bigotry. I would simply add that every suggested substitute for religion, emphatically including science, has blood on its hands too—and that healthy religion is nothing more (and nothing less) than a tool for maintaining and commemorating the evolving encounter with mystery.