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Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine, by Eric Weiner
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@font-face { font-family: "Times"; }@font-face { font-family: "Geneva"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; line-height: 150%; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } When a health scare puts him in the hospital, Eric Weiner-an agnostic by default-finds himself tangling with an unexpected question, posed to him by a well-meaning nurse. "Have you found your God yet?" The thought of it nags him, and prods him-and ultimately launches him on a far-flung journey to do just that.
Weiner, a longtime "spiritual voyeur" and inveterate traveler, realizes that while he has been privy to a wide range of religious practices, he's never seriously considered these concepts in his own life. Face to face with his own mortality, and spurred on by the question of what spiritual principles to impart to his young daughter, he decides to correct this omission, undertaking a worldwide exploration of religions and hoping to come, if he can, to a personal understanding of the divine.
The journey that results is rich in insight, humor, and heart. Willing to do anything to better understand faith, and to find the god or gods that speak to him, he travels to Nepal, where he meditates with Tibetan lamas and a guy named Wayne. He sojourns to Turkey, where he whirls (not so well, as it turns out) with Sufi dervishes. He heads to China, where he attempts to unblock his chi; to Israel, where he studies Kabbalah, sans Madonna; and to Las Vegas, where he has a close encounter with Raelians (followers of the world's largest UFO-based religion).
At each stop along the way, Weiner tackles our most pressing spiritual questions: Where do we come from? What happens when we die? How should we live our lives? Where do all the missing socks go? With his trademark wit and warmth, he leaves no stone unturned. At a time when more Americans than ever are choosing a new faith, and when spiritual questions loom large in the modern age, MAN SEEKS GOD presents a perspective on religion that is sure to delight, inspire, and entertain.
- Sales Rank: #488005 in Books
- Published on: 2012-11-06
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.00" w x 6.25" l, .88 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 368 pages
Review
"Throughout this marvelously entertaining journey, precious and universal truths emerge amid the churning of Weiner's self-conscious intellect and self-deprecating sense of humor. Weiner manages to suspend disbelief long enough to share tales of divine wonders, a possibility in all of us."―Booklist (Starred Review)
"Book of the month... Much of the power of this pilgrimage comes from the characters Weiner encounters-informed, impassioned, and idiosyncratic guides who lead the ever-questioning, ever-doubting author on a magical mystery tour that illuminates our inner and outer paths."―National Geographic Traveler
"I came to Eric Weiner's MAN SEEKS GOD looking for a fight. But in the end, I didn't find the fight I was looking for; instead, I found an affable, candid, deeply thoughtful, sometimes ironic and funny soul, with whom I shared certain similarities.... In the end, despite my proclivity for theological fisticuffs, Mr. Weiner's candor and thoughtfulness were entirely disarming. Whereas some people spend a lifetime searching for their god, Mr. Weiner's whirlwind speed-dating of deities is a thing to behold. I came to admire Mr. Weiner's tenacity and verve, trotting off to places I'll likely never go -- at least not for the same reasons -- pursuing and spending long hours with the kinds of people I'll likely only meet in passing, all in an effort to better understand the world and himself and to 'find his God.'"―Pittsburgh Post Gazette
"Winsome, self-deprecating humor marks every page."
―Publishers Weekly
"Well-researched, informative and engaging, MAN SEEKS GOD is packed with facts and wisdom that, regardless of which God you root for, will leave what a Buddhist friend of Weiner's calls 'Post-it Notes on the brain.'"
―Washington Post
"It is not so much the various religions and religious practices examined that make MAN SEEKS GOD compelling, but the people Weiner encounters and spends time with as he travels around the world in search of something to fill the proverbial 'God shaped hole.'...[an] honest and neurotic, generally entertaining book."―Bookreporter.com
"Writing about spirituality is fraught with ironies: Isn't the divine supposed to be beyond words? How to describe the inner landscape without sounding insane or precious? Eric Weiner's quirky religion-hopping travelogue, MAN SEEKS GOD actually embraces these pitfalls, while poking good-natured fun at the genre.... a refreshing departure from more weighty spiritual tomes."
―San Francisco Chronicle
"In a time when many religious people insist only their own faith is valid, Weiner traveled the world in a quest for answers to spiritual questions.... Not taking himself (or others) too seriously, Weiner's travels take him to Turkey, where he whirls, dervish-style; and Las Vegas, where he encounters Raelians, who base their beliefs on UFOs. He studies Kabbalah (without Madonna) and meditates with Tibetan lamas."―New York Post
"Books about God tend to fall into two categories: objective inquiries into the nature of belief and personal tales of spiritual awakening...Weiner's 'Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine' nimbly and often hilariously straddles the fence between the two genres....He's Woody Allen channeling Karen Armstrong."
―New York Times Book Review
About the Author
@font-face { font-family: "Times"; }@font-face { font-family: "Geneva"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; line-height: 150%; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }em { }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Eric Weiner is author of the New York Times bestseller The Geography of Bliss, which has been translated into eighteen languages. A former correspondent for NPR and the New York Times, Weiner has reported from more than three dozen countries. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Slate, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The New York Times Magazine, and the anthology, Best American Travel Writing. He divides his time between Starbucks and Caribou.
Read more about Eric Weiner at www.ericweinerbooks.com
Most helpful customer reviews
65 of 79 people found the following review helpful.
Dilettante Seeks Bestseller
By Danusha V. Goska
"Man Seeks God" is often a very superficial book on life's biggest, heaviest questions, and Eric Weiner, the book's author, is a relentlessly self-absorbed, elitist, dilettante, but that is exactly this book's charm. This is probably the only somewhat serious hardcover book that addresses Islam, Buddhism, Catholicism, Judaism, and Taoism that you could read straight through, and laugh at, during a long plane flight. This book is full of witty one-liners. A favorite: Taoism fills mankind's God-shaped hole with a hole-shaped God (220).
Weiner, your host through four thousand years of religions belief and practice, is quite the whiner. At the Second Coming, he'd obsess on his hangnail. At first I was shocked at how unabashedly self-absorbed he was, but his single-minded frankness wore me down. By the time he actually did write something serious about a spiritual experience he'd had - all the way on page 316 - I was moved.
Weiner is a very successful author and journalist who was hospitalized with a bad case of intestinal gas. (Really.) A nurse asked him if he had found his God yet. He realized he had not, and he set out looking.
I would give this book five stars instead of four if Weiner revealed any awareness of one feature of the book: his search is extraordinarily dilettantish and superficial. Others going in search of the deep truths have devoted years of sacrifice, study, and immersion. They travel far, live poor, study hard, test beliefs under the most demanding of conditions, seek teachers who themselves have inherited beliefs from generations, and lived their lessons under the toughest circumstances. None of that for Weiner. Though he travels to Asia and the Middle East, he never leaves the halo of a comfortable hotel room, a gourmet meal, American-born English speakers, a cold beer, and a flight out of town.
The superficiality of Weiner's quest is most glaring when it comes to Islam. Weiner has seen Islam in action, and he has come to be wary of it. To experience and assess Islam's take on the divine, Weiner travels not to Mecca, which, of course, would bar his entry - Weiner is Jewish and not allowed - nor to the self-proclaimed Islamic Republic of Iran or to the Taliban, assertive purveyors of Islam so pure they bomb Buddha statues and girls' schools, but rather to the Redwoods of California. Sufi Camp, where campers play with a mishmash of world religions and for no discernable reason label that "Islam," teaches neither Weiner nor the reader a darn single thing about Islam - if anything, he is obscuring this important topic for his reader. Weiner is writing, here, not about Islam, but about spiritually lost and self-indulgent modern Americans. Why not own up to that and write that essay, rather than pretend that you are saying something about Islam?
Weiner takes this same approach with Buddhism, Taoism, and Shamanism. Rather than traveling far and hard, studying deeply, and immersing himself in Buddhist, Taoist, and Shamanic cultures and traditions, Weiner sticks to his hotel room and ventures out for restaurant meals with Westerners who traveled to Kathmandu to dabble in Buddhism, to a mountain resort (equipped with its own mist machine) in China to mingle with well-heeled spiritual tourists who can afford tourist Taoism, and to a hotel room in a suburb of Washington, DC to play childish and transparent games meant to evoke authentic Shamanism.
Weiner presenting his trip to Kathmandu, Nepal, as a worthy intro to Buddhism struck me as particularly false. I've lived in traditional, village Nepal, studied Buddhism under a teacher who himself had inherited his knowledge from generations of Buddhists, and I can attest that Thamel, the tourist trap in Kathmandu where Weiner stayed, has as much to do with lived Nepali-Tibetan Buddhism as prostitution has to do with love.
The other religions Weiner dabbles in are dilettantish by nature: Wicca, a cobbled-together, make-it-up-as-you-go-along, recent, invention for people who found traditional religions' demands too harsh and restrictive, and Raelism, a religion invented by a French race car driver.
Weiner does make more grounded contact with two religions: Christianity and Judaism. These were the easiest for him to contact: Christians are the majority of the US population, and Weiner, born Jewish, had lived in Israel; a return trip for this book was easy. These chapters best reflect the religions they address, and they are the least flip and funny. Christianity comes off surprisingly well. Weiner stays with Franciscans who shelter indigent men and protest an abortion clinic. In Israel, Weiner visits Tzfat, aka Safed, a center of Kabbalah study.
Weiner is very easy on the religions he encounters. He wonders if Kabbalah study is not just mumbo-jumbo. I wish he had hit that question a little harder, and applied the same question to Taoism, which comes across as Yoda-speak: soulless cleverness, sophistry and platitudes. Weiner is uncomfortable with the Franciscans' anti-abortion protests. Why not pursue that discomfort with the Franciscans themselves? Ask them point blank, "What right do celibate men have to tell distressed women what to do with their own bodies?" Why not ask one Muslim, just one, about jihad?
I suspect that the answer is that Weiner sees religion the way his fans see religion: as kind of silly and not really worth much more attention or commitment than is required to write a genuinely funny, interesting, but, ultimately not very deep book.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
Strong showing for Weiner's second book
By Symbiosis
Eric Weiner, self-proclaimed "gastronomical Jew" who falls somewhere nearest the atheist/agnostic end of the belief spectrum, embarks on a journey to explore religion.
The faiths he chooses to indulge range from the seemingly sublime (Buddhism and Taoism) to the ridiculous (Raelianism), with a few other odd balls (Wicca, Shamanism) and variations on old standards (Sufi Islam, Franciscan Christianity and Kabbalah Judaism) thrown in for good measure.
While there is no full-water immersion here, Weiner makes a sincere effort to dip his toes into each of these belief systems. Occasionally, he finds himself waist deep; once or twice, in over his head. That's what makes this book different and better that a mere survey of religious thought - we get the perspective of a first-hand observer who walks the walk while maintaining his objectivity and humor.
With recent studies showing that non-believers are far more informed about religion in general than are those professing a particular faith, this seems the perfect book to bridge the gaping ignorance. It's both readable and respectful.
Along with his first book, the best-selling Geography of Bliss, Weiner is defining a new, witty narrative style - more subtle, perhaps, than Bill Bryson or P.J. O'Rourke, but also frequently more substantive.
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
MAN SEEKS GOD is about looking for the sacred
By Bookreporter
The spiritual journey, in fiction and nonfiction, is a tried-and-true theme because religious community and spiritual experience play a large role in the lives of so many, and have for millennia. The latest author to explore this realm is Eric Weiner, whose memoir MAN SEEKS GOD is about looking for the sacred.
While in the hospital for mysterious severe abdominal pain, a nurse ominously asked him, "Have you found your God yet?" The answer was no. Rattled by the possibility of illness (it turns out he was just fine) and spooked by the question, Weiner sets out to discover a deity, or a religion in which he can find meaning and comfort. Raised a secular "gastronomical" Jew but with no emotional ties to Judaism, and wary of the term "agnostic," the world of religion was wide open to the self-proclaimed "Confusionist."
A former NPR correspondent, Weiner was comfortable traveling the world to get information and perspective, and so that is what he did. Guided by the work and biography of philosopher and psychologist William James, author of the seminal THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, Weiner takes an experiential approach to finding God. But, ever the bibliophile, his search is informed by additional thinkers and theologians such as Ghandi, Aldous Huxley, Rumi, Lao Tzu, Rilke, Paul Tillich, Isaac Luria, and many more.
Weiner begins with Islamic mysticism, Sufism. From California to Istanbul to Konya, he ponders Sufi thought and tries to spin like the Whirling Dervishes. And while he finds beauty in the practice, Islam is not for him. He next goes to Kathmandu in search of the wisdom of Buddhist meditation, studying with a guy named Wayne and circumambulating a stupa. While he appreciates the Buddhist emphasis on compassion, he finds the religion "cold, almost clinical." And so on to a stay with some Franciscan monks in the Bronx. Chinese Taoism is one leg of the journey, and Neo-Pagan Wicca is another. There is a brief interlude with Shamanism and time at a gathering of Raëlians in Las Vegas. The Raëlians, in case you don't know, are a hedonistic UFO-based religion. Finally, Weiner finds himself in Israel learning about Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.
MAN SEEKS GOD is interesting, but not because it illuminates religious ideas or rituals. In fact, the experiences Weiner seeks out are often mystical or in some way deviant from the mainstream. Without the context of the larger tradition that, say, Sufism is part of, the experiences are jarring. To dive headlong into Buddhist meditation is difficult enough, but to do so in order to find a spiritual home without substantial Buddhist study and context is daunting, to say the least. The enterprise of finding a religion in this way seems doomed, especially coupled with the depression Weiner suffers throughout the process. Yet the process is compelling, and Weiner, the true subject of the book, is fascinating. He is at once charming and naive, profound and whiny, funny and annoying.
In the end, no major spiritual truths are uncovered, except that maybe all religions have their amazing ideas and their silly ones. Weiner finds a renewed interest in his own Jewish heritage after gaining some interesting insights into other faiths. It is not so much the various religions and religious practices examined that make MAN SEEKS GOD compelling, but the people Weiner encounters and spends time with as he travels around the world in search of something to fill the proverbial "God shaped hole." Still, the most intriguing insights are the ones he discovers about himself in this honest and neurotic, generally entertaining book.
Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
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