The Best Spiritual Writing 1998
What makes this anthology of essays and poems especially welcome and refreshing is its contemporary spiritual context. When Leonie Caldicott writes about the deaths of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and Dr. Victor Frankl (author ofMan's Search for Meaning) all in the early weeks of the fall of 1997, she makes the spiritual links that many longed for at the time but were too numbed by media hype and grief to comprehend. Francine Prose writes about witnessing her father's spiritual integrity as a pathologist in the old morgue of Bellevue Hospital while handling the dead victims of AIDS. Simultaneously, this is an anthology that promises a lengthy shelf life. Natalie Goldberg's Buddhist insights after being severely bitten by a dog in France offer timeless gems of compassion and self-deprecating humor. And Madeleine L'Engle's never-before-published essay, "Into Your Hands Lord I Commend My Spirit," reads like a nightly Christian prayer. The anthology's editor Philip Zaleski (senior editor ofParabolamagazine) has obviously taken painstaking effort to select the finest and the freshest that the year 1998 had to offer. --Gail Hudson