{"id":2498,"date":"2016-10-09T07:00:18","date_gmt":"2016-10-09T12:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/?p=2498"},"modified":"2016-12-01T10:54:55","modified_gmt":"2016-12-01T15:54:55","slug":"read-this-book-october-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/2016\/10\/read-this-book-october-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"READ THIS BOOK: October 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PhotoEach month, we ask a member of the Vanderbilt Divinity School faculty to recommend a book they are currently reading. Our October\u00a0recommendation is offered by Laurel C.Schneider,\u00a0Professor of Religious Studies,\u00a0Religion and Culture. \u00a0<\/em>Professor Schneider\u00a0recommends<\/em>\u00a0“Green Grass, Running Water<\/em>\u00a0” by Thomas King.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Thomas King\u2019s Green Grass, Running Water<\/em> is a brilliant, quirky novel that plays havoc with the lines between text and reality, history and presence, spirit\/s and everyday life.\u00a0 King is a writer of mixed Native American (Cherokee) and European heritage whose primary experience of life has been in the colonized world of Christian Native America.\u00a0 The novel has several synchronic (synoptic?) stories that run alongside each other throughout the book.\u00a0 There are four Native American young adults returning to the reservation where they were reared to celebrate the 40th<\/sup> birthday of one of them.\u00a0 Theirs are everyday stories of family difficulties, lost loves, professional hopes, and uncertain identities in a modern world.\u00a0 There are four old people \u2013 strange figures who start out in a mental hospital somewhere in the upper Midwest and whose names change, as do their apparent genders, as do their ages and other identifiers, as they go along.\u00a0 All we know of them is their dialogue, their focus on telling the story right in order to fix something (again).\u00a0 Then there is the hapless hospital administrator and canny nurse who discuss these four, and decide to follow them when they disappear from the ward.\u00a0 And finally, there is Coyote and the narrator, who wander around the other stories.\u00a0 Four stories, four directions.\u00a0 A less than orderly tale.\u00a0 We could say that this is a very Native American novel.<\/p>\n

Almost everything in this novel is biblically inflected. Almost everything in it is funny.\u00a0 Much in it is not funny, even when it is. \u00a0Choctaw Biblical scholar Steve Charleston wrote about \u201cthe old testament of Native America\u201d in order to demonstrate a different perspective on the Canaanites, turning the tables on those biblical readings that valorize the settler colonial Israelites.\u00a0 King\u2019s novel can be read as a kind of narrative exegesis on the Genesis themes of creation, fall, and the role of water. \u00a0Beyond those biblical themes, the theological importance of this novel is its ability to point past the modern obsession that relegates all strangeness to delusion and all spirits to fantasy.\u00a0 As Edward Farley noted in his wonderful little book Deep Symbols<\/em>, our era has lost its capacity for enchantment.\u00a0 What if there are<\/em> four elders who walk the earth unburdened by the dichotomy we draw between fiction and fact?\u00a0 What if Coyote does slink through all the ordered doctrines?\u00a0 What if these are metaphors, but not just<\/em> metaphors?\u00a0 Theology has a long way to go to reintroduce the possibility of enchantment, not solely as a means to understanding, but as a description of the world beyond the brittle line we draw between fact and fiction. \u00a0In another wonderful novel entitled Alif the Unseen,<\/em> a character exclaims, \u201cFind me someone to whom the hidden folk are simply real, as described in the Book.\u00a0 You\u2019ll be searching a long time.\u00a0 Wonder and awe have gone out of your religions.\u00a0 You are prepared to accept the irrational, but not the transcendent.\u201d\u00a0 Green Grass, Running Water<\/em>, I suggest, is a hefty portion of both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each month, we ask a member of the Vanderbilt Divinity School faculty to recommend a book they are currently reading. Our October\u00a0recommendation is offered by Laurel C.Schneider,\u00a0Professor of Religious Studies,\u00a0Religion and Culture. \u00a0Professor Schneider\u00a0recommends\u00a0“Green Grass, Running Water\u00a0” by Thomas King. Thomas King\u2019s Green Grass, Running Water is a brilliant, quirky novel that plays havoc with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1576,"featured_media":2503,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216],"tags":[595,1021,1050,324,453,1022,1051],"class_list":["post-2498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-read-this-book","tag-culture","tag-laurel-c-schneider","tag-readthisbook","tag-reading","tag-religious-studies","tag-thomas-king","tag-vdsfaculty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1576"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2498"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2504,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498\/revisions\/2504"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2503"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/vanderbiltdivinity\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}