book discussion

[cellio]

Last Monday night I led a book review/discussion at Temple Sinai of Karen Armstrong's A History of God. (Billed as a review, but a discussion in practice.) I'll try to write up some more thorough notes or a review or something soon; I know some of you are waiting for this. The people who organize these book discussions had told me to expect it to go about an hour, so I went in trying to do the impossible and actually summarize 4000 years of how people view God in under 45 minutes. The first thing I did was to write a list of key points/ideas (time-ordered) on a board so we would at least be aware of how much there was to cover. I figured that, that done, if people wanted to linger in, say, the world of mysticism with the understanding that we'd then give the Enlightenment short shrift, well, that was ok too. I had read the book, after all, so I wouldn't be losing anything in that approach. So I told people to interrupt with questions or if they otherwise wanted, and they did. We had a good discussion that, unbeknownst to me at the time, dove-tailed nicely with a talk that Farooq Hussani, from the local Islamic center, had given the previous day. (I wasn't there, but some people in the room had been.)

I thought the discussion went ok but that I didn't have a good-enough handle on how to run such a thing, nor did I have a good-enough handle on the material. That is, I think I did a decent job of absorbing and summarizing the material in the book, but there are issues that the book didn't get into that are important, and I hadn't done any supplementary reading. (For example, the book talks about the Protestant reformation, but I know there was a lot more to it than what is described in the book, but I don't personally have a good understanding of some of those issues.)

The other people there seemed to think it went very well, and I've gotten some nice compliments since then. One person pointed out that it people weren't enjoying themselves they wouldn't have stayed for two hours. :-)