All biography information was found in the book I received from Booksneez, The Sacred Meal by Nora Gallagher.
Nora Gallagher is a Native of New Mexico, where she was educated at St. John's College. She is author of Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith and Practicing Resurrection: A memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and moments of Grace, as well as the novel Changing Light, which is being adapted for film. She has a fellow at both the MacDowell Colony and Blue Mountain Center. She is preacher-in-residence at Trinity Episcopal Church, Santa Barbra, and sits on the advisory board of the Yale Divinity school. She lives with her husband, novelist and poet Vincent Stanley, in Santa Barbara and New York.
Like a very bad reviewer, I did absolutely no research on this book before I got it. I also confess that I did not finish this book either. I stopped in the middle of chapter four when I read a story she had written about her friend. I won't go into great detail about it, but the views and beliefs about when it is appropriate to receive communion and when it is not are very different. What she had written was pretty much a big "no-no" for me. I had even tried to move past it thinking, well that will just be something I mentioned in my review, but I found i=even more disagreeable subjects. It is clear to me that our beliefs (Gallagher's and mine are very different). For this reason I give the book two stars. One star for the three first chapters which I liked, and another star simply because I feel bad for not reading the whole entire eleven chapters. I will do better in the future to make such I research what I read before I read it.
March 4, 2011 at 9:16 AM
how can you rate a book you haven't completed?
this skews the avg rating of the book and isn't accurate in the least...disappointing
March 18, 2011 at 5:08 PM
I agree you should have read it completely. However, I can say after having read every page that Nora's theology is horribly out of whack. Overall, I've been quite discomforted with the entire series, except for "Fasting" and "In Constant Prayer". I would have liked to see your comments on the rest of the book. Please feel free to check out my review to see what you think about what you missed in the remainder of the book.
March 19, 2011 at 6:16 PM
Thank you for your comments! As I have said in my post, I did not finish reading for the sake of what I had already read. Why read the rest of a book when you just read the worst possible thing? It could not get better after what I had read. Therefore, it was, over all (no matter what) a bad read. I stopped there, and wrote a review, because after that short chapter, I would have declared it bad even if the rest was good. After that chapter, it really wasn't worth my time. Not to mention the fact, that I'm allowed to give whatever opinion on it that I wish. That is the disclaimer. Again, thank you for commenting.