God, Atheism, Travel, Suffering, and Email Love: Invite Me to Speak to Your Church, School, Library, or Club

Woman in Blue Reading a Letter by Johannes Vermeer source: Wikipedia

I read last night from "Save Send Delete" at the Montville Library. It was a profound experience for me. Because I am a little-known writer, it is always a miracle for me when I encounter a complete stranger who has read my work. It is a revelation to see the work anew through someone else's eyes. That happened for me last night.

Please consider inviting me to speak about "Save Send Delete" to your church, school, library or club. I don't expect payment.

Librarian Regina A. Bohn told me that patrons continued to give her positive feedback days after my talk at the Preakness library. After I spoke on his campus, Prof. Jay Bergman wrote, "My wife and I liked your talk immensely and learned a great deal from it. It took guts. Your students are very fortunate to have you as a teacher!" Arlene Scala, programming chair at the UU Church of the Palisades commented, "Clearly your presentation moved people. Afterwards, you were surrounded by congregants who wanted to speak with you!"

"Save Send Delete" is a true story. Some years back, I was wrestling with the big, hard questions. Is there a God? Why is there suffering? I contacted a celebrity atheist I saw on television. Our email exchange began as a debate on the existence of God. It blossomed into a love affair.

Bestselling authors have endorsed "Save Send Delete":

"Goska is a lyrical, forceful writer with a huge heart and talent to burn. Her inspiring observations embody the best vision of which we humans are capable. Goska deserves widespread attention."
– Larry Dossey, MD author, "Reinventing Medicine"

"I was very affected by the love story. The last twenty pages really had me biting my nails."
– Robert Ellsberg author of "All Saints"

"Danusha Goska writes with flair, vividness, and depth about two faith systems; two levels of consciousness; yet in each sentence, she searches for grandeur, wholeness and transcendence in both."
– Charles Ades Fishman, poet, "Chopin's Piano."

"Cheeky, mystical, merry, dark, and deep, Goska's wit, intelligence, and faith shimmer on every page."
– Jim Leary author, "So Ole Says to Lena"

"A powerful and evocative reflective journey."
– Paul Loeb, author, "Soul of a Citizen."

I have an MA from UC Berkeley and a PhD from Indiana University. My writing has won the New Jersey State Council on the Arts Grant, the PAHA Halecki Award, and others, and it's been published by Oxford University Press, Basic Books, Beliefnet, etc.

You can view the Amazon page for "Save Send Delete" here. 

FREE BOOKS!

FREE BOOKS!

I love books and like to see them going to a good home rather than moldering unwanted on a Goodwill shelf.

If you want any of these books, it is yours. I ask only that you send me five bucks to cover postage and a padded mailer envelope.

CHILDREN'S LIT

The Illustrated Treasury of Children's Literature by Margaret Martignoni

The Riverside Anthology of Children's Literature, Sixth Edition

ATHEIST

Why Darwin Matters by Michael Shermer

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

NEPALI FOLKLORE

Mani Rimdu Nepal by Mario Fantin

Six other illustrated books about Nepali folklore

LITERATURE

Brothers Karamazov with illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg. Sells for $35 on Amazon

A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold

Chicago Poems by Carl Sandburg

Calling Home: Working Class Women's Writings: An Anthology by Janet Zandy

The Novel in Antiquity by Tomas Hagg

FOLKLORE

Forests of the Vampire Slavic Myth

The Evil Eye by Alan Dundes

American Folklore Scholarship by Rosemary Zumwalt

Death by Envy by George RA Aquaro

Don't Bet on the Prince by Jack Zipes

RELIGION

Inside Islam: A Guide for Catholics by Robert Spencer

PSYCHIC

Never Letting Go by Mark Anthony

MOVIES

Richard Burton a Life by Melvyn Bragg

From Reverence to Rape the Treatment of Women in the Movies by Molly Haskell

Issues in Feminist Film Criticism Edited by Patricia Erens

PUBLIC POLICY

Same Sex Marriage Pro and Con a Reader by Andrew Sullivan

You Cannot Use the Word ____ In a Christian Book!

Eric Drooker. Source

Source

Source

I performed a Google image search of "Christian family." I found the photos, above, typical of Christian websites. These folks are so blindingly white ... not just their skins and teeth are white, their clothes and walls are white. 

Source

I performed a Google image search of "Paterson, NJ," the city I live in. I found the photo, above. These folks are Christians, too. 

Some years back I was watching a televised discussion about the existence of God. I felt compelled to email the atheist participant. To my great surprise, he responded. Our exchange continued for a year. We debated the existence of God, and we fell in love.

Two years after our relationship ended, I wrote "Save Send Delete," an account of our email debate and affair. It was an act of courage for me to argue, in the book, for my Christian faith. I am an imperfect and unorthodox Christian. I actively support gay rights. I am a feminist. I am critical of the Catholic Church that baptized and educated me and that collects my donations in its weekly baskets. I lay claim to no Christian celebrity. I possess no snapshot of myself with the pope. I don't even have a photo of myself with my parish priest. What right do I have to argue for Christian faith?

Upon reflection, I realized that it was my very imperfections, unorthodoxy, and plebian status that might lend value to my work. "Save Send Delete" isn't about the Christ, or the Christianity, of power, perfection or piety. "Save Send Delete" is about one flesh-and-blood seeker's encounter with Jesus Christ.

I sent the manuscript to secular publishers. They attacked. I received a typical rejection from the publisher of a small but trendy house, one with one of those offbeat and pretentious-in-its-lack-of-pretentiousness names, something like Used Handkerchief Publishing or Chipped Coffee Cup Press. Or maybe it was the one with the outdoorsy, New Age label – Clouds of Bodhisattva Books or Cougar's Spit Ink.

This trendy publisher's rejection leaked more corrosion than an abandoned car battery. This was a practically audible email, with its own volume – eleven – and its own pitch – fever. It's a truism among writers that literary agents, editors and publishers have no time. Once they reject your work, you are not to linger in their inbox, not to send any follow-up messages, and not to expect any. I sent a follow-up message: "Having a bad day?"

He wrote back. Immediately. More outrage. It's Christians like you, he insisted, who stone gays, and prevent evolution from being taught in schools, and burn witches.

"It is?" I responded. Just those two, two-letter words were enough to bait him into a page and a half of fresh outrage.

I wrote back. "May I help you?" You bet he wrote back. Five times.

I began sending query letters to Christian presses. I received equally impassioned but differently reasoned rejections. One publisher sent a lengthy letter praising my writing. He said that "Save Send Delete" "emasculates" atheist arguments. But then he brought the hammer down, in a sentence I don't think I'll ever forget. "You can't use the word ____ in a Christian book."

My first reaction – had I used the word ____? I checked. There it was, on the third page of the manuscript. I suddenly remembered a previous rejection. That one had said that people like me didn't do Christianity any good, and "I recoiled from the stunt you pulled on page three." At the time, I was blank. What "stunt" on page three? Now I understood.

In the 1943 novel "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," about the lives of impoverished Irish immigrants, young Francie Nolan submits to her teacher writing assignments that describe her own, real life. "Poverty, starvation, and drunkenness are ugly," this teacher tells little Francie. "We admit these things exist, but one doesn't write about them…The writer, like the artist, must strive for beauty, always…stop writing these sordid little stories."

Francie must look up the word "sordid." She discovers it means "filthy." She is crushed.

I felt like Francie Nolan. I'm also the child of immigrants. I did not realize that snooty Christian editors, my presumed social superiors, would assess my natural speech patterns as "filthy."

Ephesians 4:29 counsels against "foul" language, but, it continues, speak "only such as is good for needed edification." Colossians 4:6 says, "Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you know how you should respond to each one." Each of these verses emphasizes that speech must be honed to fit its context. The Amplified Bible makes this most clear in its translation of Ephesians 4:29: proper speech "is fitting to the need and the occasion."

I'm a working class girl from New Jersey. We use the conventional swearwords more than many other demographics. These are basic words that translate, variously, as "Ouch," "I'm shocked," "Listen," or "Nonsense!" Used judiciously, these words are not foul, but, rather, serve excellently for needed edification. We value grace in speech, and we value the seasoning, the salt.

In 2005, Princeton University Press (in New Jersey!) published Prof. Harry Frankfurt's book entitled "On Bullshit." Frankfurt and Princeton argued that no other word could have communicated exactly what "bullshit" communicated. "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug," said Mark Twain. Words are power, power Christians are commanded by God to harness.

If Christians decide not to mention, when mention is called for, a given aspect of life, their speech is not edifying, it is not seasoned with salt. Jesus modeled this in his longest recorded conversation, the conversation with the Woman at the Well. In John 4:18, with the mercilessness of a film noir antihero, Jesus states the erotic facts of this woman's life. It's hard not to be shocked by his bluntness, but it is his bluntness that causes her to state, in the very next verse, "I can see that you are a prophet."

After the rejection that accused me of pulling a "stunt," I thought of the graphics on the webpages of Christian publishers. Puppies and kittens. Ponies and daisies. Soft focus and airbrushed. These warm and fuzzy graphics communicated Christianity-as-Barcalounger, Christianity as a soft, fat piece of furniture one could occupy when one wanted to feel sheltered and smug.

I thought of the view outside my window. I see garbage, a bar, gang members. I see my neighbor, a single mother from the Dominican Republic, with determined gait, heading to her job as a nurse's aide. I see her fatherless son, obese, leaning on a fence, far from any playing field, on his face the resignation of a caged animal, a life-form suspended by boredom and neglect till death or explosion.

I thought of the vocabulary necessary to converse with my students about their most pressing concerns. My students don't approach me to have urgent, one-on-one conversations about puppies or kittens. These conversations never require multi-syllable, abstract, Latin nouns: sola scriptura, actus purus, transubstantiation. My students need to talk about pain, and the obscene vocabulary of abuse, betrayal, and exploitation. They need to confess to the orgy at a tacky Route 3 motel, the boyfriend who impregnated, the girlfriend who teased, and then ran. They need to talk about mom's boyfriend who takes her daughter into the basement of the public housing complex and rapes her. They need to disgorge the words that name the unique nausea caused by the deaths of those who should not die. Nice words need not apply.

If Christians quarantine this vocabulary, they relegate these conversations to non-Christians who are all too ready to use these words. Atheists don't have any problem using the vocabulary needed to talk about sex or pain or bodily functions. And so my students, if turned away by me on the basis on of the inadmissibility of necessary words, would simply turn to atheists.

This relegation of discussion of the most intimate, the most intense, the most telling and testing moments of life to non-Christians is both tragic and farcical. If Jesus does not belong in that basement with that inner city girl being raped, Jesus does not belong anywhere.

Billy Graham used the word ____. Pope John Paul II used the word ____. Mother Teresa used the word ____. They've used the word, either out loud or internally, because it names an escapable part of life. Since we all know that we've all spoken, or at least thought, the word, a public pretense that we have never used it, or that we live on the planet where this vocabulary word is not necessary, suggests that we require phoniness in order to be Christian.

Thomas Friedman tells us that the world is flat and crowded. Technology places office workers in Kansas into competition with office workers in Bangalore. Technology also places Christianity into instant competition with ancient traditions like Hinduism, invented ones like Neo-Paganism, as well as atheism. Only a Christianity vital in its authenticity will survive these debates. On this playing field, we can't afford to anesthetize our language. We need to be able to address the panoply of human experience, as did Jesus himself.

This essay appears in the February 8 - March 14 issue of The Ryder magazine. 

Win a Free Copy of "Save Send Delete"!

I'll be reading at the Montville Public Library on Wednesday, February 13th, at 7 pm. 

Tell your friends -- and if someone comes to the reading because you told him or her about it, you win a free copy of "Save Send Delete"! 

Directions to the Montville Public Library are here. 

The Amazon page for "Save Send Delete" is here. 

"Argo" May Very Well Be the Best Film of 2012

"Argo," among the nominees for the 2012 Best Picture Academy Awards, may very well be the best film of 2012, and Ben Affleck may very well be the best director. Unlike other frontrunners, "Lincoln" and "Zero Dark Thirty," "Argo" is a movie-movie. Like those other two films, it tells a true story, but unlike those other two, disappointing films, "Argo" is not a starchy and lumpy docudrama. "Argo" is a smoothly running machine.

"Argo" tells a gripping story in a gripping way, never preaching ("Lincoln"), never getting too caught up in one aspect of the story to distort the narrative line ("Zero Dark Thirty" and "Lincoln.") "Argo" wants to entertain you, and it does. It's a thriller. My palms were sweating as much while watching this movie as while watching an old-fashioned suspense flick by Alfred Hitchcock, even though, like most viewers, I know how the story ends. I found the opening scene of the storming of the US embassy in Tehran so frightening I could hardly watch it. This is all the  more remarkable given that I'd heard a radio interview in which Affleck joked about finding only older actors to perform the part of the "students" storming the embassy.

"Argo"'s cast is full of actors I know well, have seen in many other films, and whom I like a lot: Affleck, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Victor Garber, Bryan Cranston. It's testimony to the film's power that I stopped thinking about these actors and got lost in the characters they were playing.

"Argo" tells the true story of a CIA plot to release six Americans from Iran during the hostage crisis. The plot: pretend that the six Americans are Canadians there to scout locations for an upcoming Sci-Fi flick.

John Goodman and Alan Arkin are utterly believable, funny, and moving as the Hollywood part of the team. There's a brilliant, throwaway scene in which Alan Arkin and Richard Kind bargain over the price of a movie script. The scene doesn't advance the plot, but the dialogue is perfect and fast. It's just a witty respite in a tense movie about a life-and-death situation. Ben Affleck is perfect as a CIA operative. He keeps his cards very close to his chest.

Farshad Farahat plays an amazingly hairy airport guard. He screams in Farsi. Most audience members, not speaking Farsi, will have no idea what this man is saying – there are no subtitles. Even so, we are terrified. Farahat deserves an award for his brief but pivotal performance as the face and voice of the enemy the entire world now confronts, an enemy driven by incoherent, focused, murderous rage.

"Argo" has a little bit of heartwarming family drama, a little bit of arcane CIA in-shop detail, a little bit of Hollywood behind-the-scenes banter, a very little bit of nightmarish torture. It never lingers in one type of scene too long; it just glides along, telling its story as economically and movingly as possible.
***
If you liked "Argo," you'll like "Save Send Delete;" it will provide you with provocative discussion of Islam. 

"Warm Bodies" 2013, Review: Only Lukewarm

"Warm Bodies" is only lukewarm. A zombie named R (Nicholas Hoult) eats the brains of Perry (Dave Franco) and thereby falls in love with Perry's girlfriend, Julie (Teresa Palmer). The movie is meant to be a bit scary, a bit funny, and a bit romantic, but I wasn't much scared, I didn't laugh, and the romance was stale and flatfooted.

Julie and R jump into a sports car to escape from menacing zombies and skeletons. The top is down; it begins to rain. They drive into an abandoned, post-Apocalyptic suburban neighborhood. Julie is cold; she has to take off her clothes. She does so in front of R. Teresa Palmer is a very beautiful young woman. R is a frustrated teen zombie madly in love with Julie. The director does absolutely nothing with this scene. There's no special lighting; the camera doesn't show us Julie's beauty as desperate, lovestruck R would see it.

There are multiple chase scenes, none of which make much sense. Julie sees her well-armed father in a convoy and does nothing to join him, but later escapes on her own to join him, a much riskier trip. Why didn't she go earlier? No explanation.

If you're looking for a funny zombie movie, check out "Shaun of the Dead," and "Zombieland." If you're looking for a fully realized romance between a living woman and a dead man, watch "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir" and "Truly Madly Deeply." If you like romances between women and monsters, see Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast," or "King Kong."

"Warm Bodies" isn't a bad movie. It has its moments. R whines to his fellow zombie, Rob Corddry, about Julie, and Corddry's one word responses is the funniest line in the movie. The movie's conclusion is heartwarming if a bit half-baked.

***

If you like romances between opposites – the living and the dead, for example – check out "Save Send Delete," a love story between and atheist and a believer.

Massachusetts Bishop Robert J. McManus Squelches Frank Discussion of Islam

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Worcester, Massachusetts invited author Robert Spencer to a Catholic men's conference to be held in March. Bishop Robert J. McManus then ordered that the invitation to Robert Spencer be rescinded. Public statements from the diocese indicate that Spencer's invitation was withdrawn because Bishop Robert J. McManus wanted to please Muslims, did not want to offend Muslims, and did not want any trouble from Muslims.

The Worcester Telegram and Gazette reported:

"Monsignor Thomas Sullivan, the organizer of the conference … said Bishop Robert J. McManus pulled the invitation to avoid a controversy. He said Bishop McManus opted to withdraw the invitation 'rather than undergo a media outcry.' 'I was not looking for a problem,' he said. 'The bishop felt that by disinviting him we would be avoiding a problem in casting a bad light on Christian-Islamic relations.'"

Robert Spencer, a devout Catholic, who has published a guide to Islam for Catholics, published by a Catholic publisher, has been refused permission to speak about Islam to Catholics at a Catholic conference because Muslims complained.

Bishop McManus' decision reeks of cowardice.

Bishop McManus' decision is a flagrant announcement of a lack of integrity.

And that's not all. Counterintuitively, Bishop McManus' decision is bad for Muslims.

That's right. Declaring any frank, public discussion of Islam to be taboo is bad for Muslims.

Free speech is the best friend American Muslims have.

Thanks to free speech, we get to talk things out. We don't have to allow troubling matters to simmer below the surface, going unaddressed, festering, and, eventually, exploding.

But free speech about Islam is rendered taboo by cowards and by the Politically Correct.

Serious discussion of Islam is all but banned on college campuses, in churches, and in much journalism.

Those denied the right to speak about Islam begin to view Muslims as bullies who enjoy special protections denied their own faiths. We all know you can say any vile thing you want about Catholicism. Resentments spring up.

Suspicion proliferates. Average people sense that the powers-that-be are not telling them the truth about Islam. Denied open debate, discontentment is driven underground. I've witnessed these underground discussions of Islam, and they are disturbing. Extremists say extreme things. "We can't trust the government on this. It's every man for himself." These extremists would be robbed of their power if responsible parties on college campuses, in journalism, and in the church allowed free and frank discussion of Islam. We are risking explosion, an explosion that will be bad for everyone, including Muslims.

As a Catholic, I am appalled by Bishop McManus' decision. I learned in Catholic school that my faith would be tested by the world, and that, no matter the test, God would give me the courage to proclaim my faith, and not submit to others, even unto a martyr's death, if necessary. I was taught that a martyr's death was nothing to shun, but a privilege to be embraced. I admired martyrs from the ancients like Prisca and Blandina to modern martyrs like Maximilian Kolbe and Jerzy Popieluszko. Martyrs, ancient and modern, braved torture for their Christian faith. Bishop McManus caved in to letters written to him by disgruntled Muslims. Sad.

Catholics should protest Bishop McManus' wrongheaded decision to attempt to silence Robert Spencer.

Contact information:

Diocese Spokesman Raymond Delisle: rdelisle@worcesterdiocese.org

Bishop Robert McManus: rmcmanus@worcesterdiocese.org

Diocese of Worcester: 508-791-7171

More details on this story here.