The Oregon Extension

Imaginative journeys and honest listening

Creative, challenging books are the love of our academic lives at the OE. We read books in a way that allows us to experience them deeply, to hold their questions tenderly in our hands, to enter their imaginative worlds respectfully, to accompany their authors on journeys that engage our hearts and spirits as well as our heads. We read books meditatively and interactively, allowing them to shed new light on and ask new questions of our lives. We love when good books seduce or disturb us. We expect books to draw us into honest listening and speaking with our fellow learners.

We all read about fifteen books during the core sections of the semester. View the 2012 list or look below for a a sampling from the past few years:

Eliza Griswold, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Jeffrey Goldberg, Prisoner: A Muslim & A Jew Across the Middle East Divide

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Tracey Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr Paul Farmer

Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough Planet

Shusaku Endo, Deep River

David James Duncan, The River Why and The Brothers K

Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge

Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader

Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Race of Cultural Devastation

Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body

J.D. Salinger, Franny & Zooey

James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination

Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy

St. Augustine, Confessions

Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith