"Kathleen Norris writes about religion with the imagination of a poet."-Molly McQuade, The Chicago TribuneAs she did in The Cloister Walk and Dakota, Kathleen Norris blends history, anecdote, memoir, and theology with a poet's grasp of language, this time examining common religious terms that often intimidate people and distance them from the religious tradition they were raised in.Having spent most of her adult life as a nonbeliever, Norris found that one of the greatest struggles in her journey back to the church was with the vocabulary of the Christian religion. Words such as
"judgment,"
"prayer,"
"faith,"
"grace,"
"dogma,"
"Bible," and even
"Christ" formed what she calls her
"scary vocabulary"-words that demanded to be grappled with before they could confer a blessing. Each word is the occasion for an examination of a particular aspect of the Christian lexicon and for telling the stories of how she came to her understanding of it.Kathleen Norris has been widely praised for the engaging way in which she enables readers of all beliefs to join her exploration of the nature of faith. In Amazing Grace, she continues herexamination of a spiritual world rooted firmly in the chaos of daily life, challenging our fears of difficult theological concepts while granting believers and doubters alike a brilliant and illuminating perspective on them.Kathleen Norris is an award-winning poet and writer and the author of The Cloister Walk and Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, as well as three volumes of poetry, the most recent being Little Girls in Church. She lives in South Dakota.
