Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Cults, Sex, and Vegetarian Recipes

Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat ― An American History by Christina Ward

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I loved this book, which is an odd thing to say because it took me weeks to finish it. It is dense. And the crazy stuff that people called “religion” required more than a few re-reads. On Rosicrucianism Paschal Beverly Randolph saw sex as a powerful energy that could be controlled and sublimated into magical works. As he explored sex magic and the power of the Will, he came to odds with Madame Blavatsky who, as others have testified, tried to kill him with her […]

How does this child have the energy to do so many high-stakes things?!

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

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Since its release in 1995, there has been a movie adaptation and a TV adaptation of The Golden Compass (originally titled Northern Lights outside of North America), so I’m guessing that we all have a general understanding of the plot, but here is a brief overview. Lyra is a brash, headstrong, and fearless girl. She and her daemon Pan (a physical manifestation of the soul in the world Lyra is from) live at Jordan College in Oxford under the care of the Scholars of the college where she […]

A refreshing conversation about sexuality and spirituality…

Shameless by Nadia Bolz-Weber

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As someone who grew up in the Christian tradition in the 90s, this was a book I am very thankful for. It was not uncommon in the circles of my youth to have any conversations about sex include all of the following: don’t even THINK about sex until you are married…before marriage you need to suppress your sexuality, be ultra-modest, and be careful to not tempt the boys… when you DO get married tho, flip that switch and unleash your inner nympho… oh, and also, […]

A History of the Quirks of the Church of Christ

Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America by Richard Hughes

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Like many millennial Christians, my faith is central to my life but I don’t identify strongly with any particular sect or denomination. In fact, the whole denomination issue seems to me to be at worst be divisive, and at best a sort of menu of preferred “flavors” of church. That being said, I did grow up in the “Church of Christ” tradition. For the unfamiliar, CoC  can be quickly described as “Baptist, but with more communion and fewer guitars” or “libertarian church”. Since I’ve never […]

God Bless the Gargoyles and us, too

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I absolutely love the illustrations in God Bless the Gargoyles. Dav Pilkey has stepped away from his more humorous stories and gone a spiritual and Christian route. The nod to a famous painting also is a neat treat. While the story is religious (the Church, the story of gargoyles and angels), it is not “in your face” overly religious. It is more of a spiritual story. However yet, it is not for a non-believer.   I would have like more history of the gargoyle. It […]

He’d spent time rehearsing this serene pose

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This was a kind of a placeholder for me. I’m not allowing myself to reread American Gods again, because I reread it less than a year ago, and I love it too much, and the TV series is coming, and it’s my favorite kind of book, so I had to find a proxy, and this looked super interesting. And it was good, but not amazing (nothing is American Gods, goddamnit!). I think the hardest for me was that Ike is no hero, antihero, complicated scamp, […]



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