{"id":2342,"date":"2023-12-14T20:36:48","date_gmt":"2023-12-15T01:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/spiritualnaturalist\/?p=2342"},"modified":"2023-12-07T20:39:10","modified_gmt":"2023-12-08T01:39:10","slug":"book-review-for-small-creatures-such-as-we","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/spiritualnaturalist\/2023\/12\/book-review-for-small-creatures-such-as-we\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: For Small Creatures Such as We"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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(This article is by guest writer Buck Marchinton<\/em>. For a short bio, see below.)<\/em><\/p>\n
Rituals are, among other things, tools that help us process change. \u2013 Sasha Sagan<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As an adult, Sasha Sagan makes her living as a writer, editor, and producer. As a child, she was instilled by her parents with a joy for the wonders of the cosmos and an unshakable respect for evidence over fantasy, speculation, or myth (her father is the late Carl Sagan). Her communications training and scientific foundations blend well in her 2019 memoir,\u00a0For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World<\/em>.\u00a0 In it, she ponders her own inner need for meaningful rituals, studying both natural phenomena and the ceremonies and beliefs of cultures around the world and throughout history.<\/p>\n
I must admit, as I read past the first couple of pages of the introduction, I realized I was hearing Carl Sagan\u2019s voice in my head.\u00a0 I immediately searched for an interview on Youtube so I could hear Sasha\u2019s own spoken voice and recalibrate the inner timbre and rhythm. But it shouldn\u2019t surprise that one hears the voice of the great popularizer of science in his daughter\u2019s words, for Carl\u2019s life \u2013 and death \u2013 resonate through Sasha\u2019s own thoughts. They provide the foundation of her own thought processes and philosophy, and echo in the milestones and small moments of her life.\u00a0 Even the title of her book is drawn from a quote in\u00a0Contact<\/em>, a novel written by her parents.<\/p>\n
Raised in a very secular home, Sasha was nevertheless aware of ritual and celebrations taking place around her.\u00a0 Although of Jewish descent, she sometimes went to mass with her nanny, and keenly felt bereft of Christmas as a child.\u00a0 As an adult, she felt moved to perform certain Jewish rituals \u2013 craving meaning in ancient traditions while sometimes struggling with the theist implications. \u00a0Now the mother of a small child, she ponders what rituals and traditions she should impart to her offspring.<\/p>\n
This book is more than a memoir. For each anecdote, Sasha pulls in related rituals or impulses from tribes, religions, and cultures around the world.\u00a0 Then she ruminates on these ideas in the context of her own life experience. She speaks of daily rituals between her and her husband (of Christian background, but now secular). She ponders the observances of the turning of the seasons, rites of passage such as marriage and death, monthly rhythms (of community, astronomy and physiology), sex, atonement, the independence days of individuals and nations, and others.<\/p>\n
She discusses Thanksgiving Day: \u201c\u2026a kind of harvest festival, might be America\u2019s best-loved secular holiday, but officially, the modern incarnation of Thanksgiving was introduced as expressly theistic.\u201d She goes on to point out that the fiction of Native Americans and Pilgrims celebrating together is national rather than religious myth.<\/p>\n
Sasha Sagan ponders the effort required to form a secular version of the community that religion readily supplies in the form of congregations; she discusses her successful attempt at community creating, and how it spread and evolved. She talks about abiding grief that sometimes resurfaces years later, and the small ways she has found comfort. She talks about the picture of her great-great-grandparents hanging near her parents\u2019 kitchen, put there to remind her that they starved to death and that their living descendants were damned fortunate.<\/p>\n
This is a guidebook of sorts, but not the authoritative how-to-ritual sort I see on the shelves so often.\u00a0 Questions of ritual and ceremony arise in the author\u2019s mind. She searches for the natural phenomena behind the observances, cites the diverse methods of many cultures to mark said observances, and then speaks of her choice of ritual and why.\u00a0 Along the way, she affirms, always beautifully and sometimes poignantly, her family\u2019s evidence-based beliefs.\u00a0 As she says in the introduction, \u201cMy parents taught me that nature as revealed by science was a source of great, stirring pleasure. Logic, evidence and proof did not detract from the feeling that something was transcendent \u2013 quite the opposite. It was the source of its magnificence.\u201d<\/p>\n
People who are interested how ritual might enhance one\u2019s life should find this book well worth the time.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brief Bio:<\/strong>\u00a0Buck Marchinton is a wildlife biologist in Georgia.\u00a0 Besides possessing a\u00a0 passion for educating others about the natural world, he is deeply interested in a wide range of history, from the paleolithic forwards.\u00a0\u00a0 He has been a philosophical naturalist for years, but only recently found it had a proper name.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(This article is by guest writer Buck Marchinton. For a short bio, see below.) Rituals are, among other things, tools that help us process change. \u2013 Sasha Sagan As an adult, Sasha Sagan makes her living as a writer, editor, and producer. As a child, she was instilled by her parents with a joy for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1269,"featured_media":2345,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[229,186,884],"class_list":["post-2342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spiritual-naturalism","tag-book","tag-nature","tag-sagan"],"yoast_head":"\nBook Review: For Small Creatures Such as We<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"(This article is by guest writer Buck Marchinton. For a short bio, see below.) 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