Book Review: Tales of Wonder – Adventures Chasing The Divine

Tales of Wonder

This is an autobiography of Huston Smith.  Smith has written 14 books, most notably, The World’s Religions. During his career, he taught at Washington University, Syracuse, MIT and U.C. Berkeley.

This is an extraordinarily well written book. Jeffrey Paine of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (formerly a judge on the Pulitzer Prize committee) writes this amazing story of Smith’s life.

A fascinating read. Huston claims the soul of Christianity as his faith and became a practicing Muslim, Hindi and Buddhist during his lifetime. The metaphor Smith uses to provide a framework for understanding human existence is the cross:

“Our life in historical or chronological time, measuring and minding, cautious and comparing, forms the horizontal arm of the cross. Our experience of the unqualified, of inner, immeasurable time (or timelessnesss) is the cross’s vertical pole. We live in two kinds of time or perspective simultaneously. The horizontal and the vertical are at once quite distinct and entirely overlapping, and to experience their incongruity and confluence is what it means to be human.” (p.41).

Huston’s life can be characterized by the following phrase:

to think of how to think the way I do not think,” (p.130)

His life explored the dilemma whereby “Once different religions knew about each other only enough to kill or convert one another.” (p.51). Smith’s life exemplified that the exploration of a varierty of faith persuasions allowed him to tap dimensions of the human experience that he was unaware of. His life illustrated the observation that, “The great changes in history occur, I believe, not through argument but through seeing things differently.” (p.106).

This autobiography of Huston Smith provides tangible evidence that great changes in human beings occur, not through argument, but through seeing things differently.

This is truly a divine adventure. I recommend it.

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