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 2009 list or look below for a a sampling from the past few years:
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
J. D. Salinger, Franny & Zooey
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer…
Shusaku Endo, Deep River
David James Duncan, The River Why and The Brothers K
Jennifer Gonnerman, Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge
Leslie Marmon Silko, Storyteller
James Gilligan, Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic
Simone Weil, The Simone Weil Reader
David Simon & Edward Burns, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life
Anne Fadiman, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation
John Caputo, On Religion
Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
Jeffrey Goldberg, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide
David Griffith, A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America
William Stringfellow, Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
David Duncan is currently hard at work finishing his new novel. We’re grateful for his willingness to carve out some time to come and chat with us at Lincoln. We welcome him heartily, and we welcome you, incoming students. We look forward to the conversation.