Read PDF This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession EBOOK EPUB KINDLE PDF
Description for This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession
Review One of the Rumpus�s best books of 2019Recommended by Bren� Brown in her 2019 roundup of Fall Book Love
�With a rare combination of candor and grace, the author exposes some of evangelicalism�s frailties without disparaging or dismissing those who are still believers, making her narrative accessible to a wide audience.?.?.?.?A generous and unflinchingly brave memoir about faith, feminism, and freedom.� ?Kirkus �Hammon�s engrossing debut?.?.?. will stun and move both Christian and general readers alike.� ?Publishers Weekly�A moving, valuable look at the social structures of evangelical Christianity, the treatment of women artists, and the challenge of remaining present in a marriage.?.?.?.?Stories from her career are fascinating and touching, and they expose infuriating sexism.� ?Foreword�[The] misogyny?in churches that allow women to �speak� but not �preach�?should not come as a surprise to readers, but the particularities of Hammon�s experience bring the effect of these slights, big and small, to life. . . . Her strikingly contemporary reflections about her treatment in conservative churches . . . make her story a salient one for this particular moment, in the wake of the #MeToo Movement.� ?Martha Park, The Millions�Her work demands that we deeply reflect on our complacency?and more frighteningly, our inadvertent participation?in all matters of injustice.� ?America Magazine�This is not a niche issue: A quarter of Americans identify as evangelical Christians, and the church has significant political clout. For evangelical Christians who, like the author, struggle to be both believers and feminists, Dezen Hammon�s story offers hope and validation. For those outside the church, the book is an edifying behind-the-scenes tour.� ?Robyn Ross, Texas Observer�The memoir�s sure sentences and careful, critical exploration of becoming an �exvangelical� never quite obscure the tension that grips its author in the process of telling. That�s not to say that the memoir is tense or uncertain, but that Hammon never shirks the seriousness of such truth-telling.� ?Katharine Coldiron, Ravishly�In the page-turning memoir, Hammon presents her personal experiences with faith, feminism, and family to challenge the reader and shed light on an antiquated system that has produced what she describes as present-day oppression: being female in the church.� ?Zachary McKenzie, Houston CityBook�There is a deep and insatiable longing at the center of Cameron Dezen Hammon�s spellbinding debut memoir: to love and be loved with honesty and abandon, to follow a spiritual path toward clarity and truth. While navigating the contradictions of faith and feminism, of doubt and desire, of the sometimes unbridgeable distance between what we believe and what we know, Hammon discovers that sometimes the crises that shake our most deeply held religious convictions are those that lead us toward what we truly believe. This Is My Body signals the arrival of an exceptional new voice.� ?Lacy M. Johnson, author of The Reckonings: Essays�Cameron Dezen Hammon has taken on two of the greatest mysteries of life?romantic love and religious conviction?and woven them into a gripping narrative of discovery. She invites us back stage into a world some of us may not know well at all?a creative life in a church community. Her story of conversion and the many days that follow it is especially compelling in its willingness to be so honest?flaws and failures frankly explored. Her text acknowledges a reader as friend from the very beginning.� ?Naomi Shihab Nye, author Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners�This fearless examination of Cameron Dezen Hammon�s dark night of the soul begins with a startling moment, where death and sex and God and doubt swirl around each other. Then, word by word?slowly, beautifully, thrillingly?she circles that moment, until a hard-won mercy emerges.� ?Nick Flynn, author of The Reenactments�Fundamentalism has a way of reducing all of life�s complexities into a rigid set of binaries?pure or impure, sinner or saint, saved or damned. In This Is My Body, writer and musician Cameron Dezen Hammon chronicles her initial love affair with the evangelical faith, her gradual discomfort with its patriarchal structures, and her brave pursuit of a more nuanced spirituality. Hammon�s prose soars as she boldly dismantles the rigid worldview that once gave her comfort and rebuilds from the ground upwards, newly committed to authenticity and truth. Unflinchingly honest and searingly lyrical, this is a song of a book.� ?Jessica Wilbanks, author of When I Spoke in Tongues�To find answers, Hammon must find the questions. And then she must persist in asking them. What we learn from this book is that it is human to love, and it is human to need to be loved.� ?Angela Morales, author of The Girls in My Town�With honesty and courage, Cameron Dezen Hammon confronts the personal, the spiritual, and the cultural in this stunning memoir. Written in sharp and lucid prose, Hammon explores passion, doubt, and the risks of faith. This Is My Body carries an urgency and a candor seldom seen in contemporary memoirs. In two words, Hammon�s story is beautiful and brave.� ?Mark Haber, Brazos bookseller and author of Reinhardts Garden�When one rests in the truth of their own story, it allows all those who hear that truth to find their own rest. I rested deeply in the truth of This Is My Body. And that truth set me free.� ?Scott Erickson, author/artist of Prayer: Forty Days of Practice Read more About the Author Author and musician Cameron Dezen Hammon�s writing appears in The Kiss anthology from W. W. Norton, Catapult, Ecotone, the Literary Review, the Houston Chronicle, NYLON, and elsewhere; and her essay �Infirmary Music� was named a notable in The Best American Essays 2017. She earned an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University and is a writer-in-residence for Writers in the Schools in Houston, where she lives with her family. This Is My Body is her debut book. Read more Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter 1: Dead GirlsMy phone buzzes in the pocket of my dress. I slip my hand in to silence it.'I wish I could hold you.' The text message is from a man I�ve given no name to in my contact list. Whose number I�ve blocked and unblocked in turns. A man I was with just one week ago, a man I might love, a man who is not the father of my eight-year-old daughter. Not my husband of twelve years.From where I stand on the stage, I can see only the back of the open casket. I fidget with my dress and glance around the room as the spotlight slowly comes up over me. The stage is four feet off the ground, deep and long, with a floor-to-ceiling screen behind it flanked by two more illuminated screens. The Refuge, this suburban megachurch, meets in a converted gymnasium. During the week, the gym is used for youth basketball games. Darkened as it is now, with an elaborate lighting trellis that soaks us in purples and blues while projecting geometric patterns onto the walls, it looks like a set from Tron. The blue lights make the white casket lid glow. Smoke billows from stage left, and the band strikes a minor chord. The music swells behind me, and I open my mouth, ready to sing, but try not to make eye contact with the bereaved family weeping in the front row. My husband stands just to my right, strumming his acoustic guitar. I wrap my hand around my phone, now silent in my pocket.I�ve been on staff at this church as a worship leader?a paid singer and bandleader?for about a year, and the sound-and-light show is part of every service we do, one on Saturday night and two on Sunday morning. I�ve been a singer all my life, but a Christian singer for just over ten years?at a Presbyterian church with ruby-red carpeting, an Episcopal church that boasted George H. W. and Barbara Bush as members, and an edgy downtown nondenominational church that met in a converted warehouse. Pushing forty now, I know that the preference in a church like this is for a younger woman to do my job, to help draw in other young people. But I tend to look younger than I am, and I make it a point to dress like the millennials the church hopes to attract. I think this is part of why they hired me. The man who texted me is younger than I am by a few years. We type things like WYWH (wish you were here) and OMW (on my way) in our exchanges sometimes, a nod to the irony and impossibility of our situation. I glance at my husband, whom I love, but whom I�ve felt distant from for years. He�s looking out over the silent congregation as the rest of the stage lights come up. I begin the first song, let the notes slide from my throat. The wireless microphone picks up the slight tremble in my voice, the sip and rattle of my breath.Despite my decade of experience as a minister, I�m surprised by this dramatic presentation for a funeral. Very often a grieving family, especially one in shock, will leave the details of the service to the pastors and staff, who will produce a funeral much like any normal weekend worship service. Without the casket, a passerby might confuse us for a nightclub. When the church leadership designed the Refuge, they did it with this goal in mind. The aging senior pastor and somewhat secretive committee of influential and generous laypeople, whom I�ve never met, believe a show will attract millennials. But I�m not sure they anticipated that the flashy aesthetic would extend to funerals. Other buildings on the church�s sprawling campus are more traditionally reverent, with wooden pews and stained glass.The young pastor of the Refuge is a recent seminary grad, a transplant to Texas from Florida, and this is a high-stakes job for him. Since he arrived a few months ago, he�s been aggressively trying to address the church�s dwindling attendance and increase membership, an unstated but clear expectation. If he�s unable to, it�s likely he won�t keep his job for long. Maybe he recommended the family hold the funeral in this space, a way to show grieving friends and loved ones the spectacle that is the Refuge, to create a captive audience who might otherwise never venture through its doors. Read more
Books are everywhere. Libraries big and small and bookstores are splattered all over college campuses and larger cities. They are all filled with one of the most important things of all time—books. Those who read books appreciate the multiple places to find books. Those who aren’t fans of books, don’t understand what could make readers want to obsess over books. There is a reason for their obsession, though. You hear it all the time: read every day.Reading is important because it develops our thoughts, gives us endless knowledge and lessons to read while keeping our minds active. Reading books to help us learn and understand and makes us smarter, not to mention the knowledge, vocabulary and thinking skills we develop.In the world today where information are abundant, reading books is one of the best ways to be informed. Though reading might seem like simple fun, it can be helping your body and mind without you even realising what is happening. What makes reading so important? It can be for these reasons and not just knowledge.For those who don’t enjoy it, you might change your mind after hearing about the benefits. Can something so easy and fun be so helpful in your life? Of course, it can! Reading can be a great benefit to you in many different ways—such as sharpening your mind, imagination, and writing skills. With so many advantages, it should be an everyday occurrence to read at least a little something.Books can hold and keep all kinds of information, stories, thoughts and feelings unlike anything else in this world. Can words, paragraphs, and fictional worlds be all that great for you and your health? It definitely can, and it is a timeless form of entertainment and information
Step-By Step To Download This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession
- Click The Button "DOWNLOAD" Or "READ ONLINE"
- Sign UP registration to access & UNLIMITED BOOKS
- DOWNLOAD as many books as you like (personal use)
- CANCEL the membership at ANY TIME if not satisfied
- Join Over 80.000 & Happy Readers.
CLICK HERE TO READ ONLINE "This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession" FULL BOOK
OR
No comments:
Post a Comment