Reviews for The Divine Library: A Comprehensive Reference Guide to the Sacred Texts & Spiritual Literature of the World

The average rating for The Divine Library: A Comprehensive Reference Guide to the Sacred Texts & Spiritual Literature of the World based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-01-07 00:00:00 James Hernandez Even the Introduction was interesting. I've always said we can't make truth, untrue. It is fascinating how many of the "Sacred Texts" hold some of the same truths. Regardless of your faith system, you truly should know what others use as their references. The book explains diplomatically what texts say without negotiating validity. Do you know where your sacred text came from? Was it an original work? Was it pieced together from older texts? Was it repackaged to suit the leaders of your faith system? OK, so the last question isn't specifically answered, and I'm glad it wasn't, but the book is a great place to start to investigate such questions.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-01-07 00:00:00 Vance Julien Leonard Shengold takes his title from one of Charles Dickens' stories, "The Haunted Man." Shengold quotes from the story: "My parents, at the best, were of that sort whose care soon ends, and whose duty is soon done. . . . Thus I prey upon myself. Thus memory is my curse; and, if I could forget my sorrow and my wrong, I would." Through case histories, (auto)biographies of famous persons, and literary texts, Shengold explores the effects of patients' excessive attachment to parents whose influence was emotionally detrimental or who left too soon due to death or abandonment. It is by being "haunted by parents," Shengold argues, that we insist that "change is loss" and refuse to make healthy adjustments. [He is speaking about personal development, which is the spirit in which his work must be taken. My one argument with Shengold is that he fails to take into account cultural and political factors. That is, change DOES mean loss if "change" means one's land or job or family or traditions have been forcibly taken away.] As Shengold wisely points out, helping patients to "own" their reluctance to lessen parents' longlasting domination requires much therapeutic repetition of memories, dreams, associations, analytic interpretations, and so forth. Thus, his book itself is therapeutic in that there are carefully linked but somewhat repetitive narratives about fascinatingly "haunted" figures such as Benjamin Spock, William Wordsworth, Leonard Woolf, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov, and so on. Also, there is the beautifully repeated motif of the spring garden (womb) that comes to life but dies away so that all that's left is a memory. Such repetition helps one understand the full power of Shengold's argument.