In the summer I try to do learning with the girls. This week we read "What do you Believe?" I want to make sure that the girls understand how other people are living their lives and that they can make good decisions about how they live their own lives. It is also important to me that they can see how Christianized our culture is (even spell check just capitalized it for me) and that they are able to ask smart questions about these things.
This book seemed like a good overall introduction to different belief systems. It is Doris Kindersly who is usually a decent publisher. It was all going ok until we got to the two pages where they threw in everything not "Religion" including aboriginal spirituality, norse mythology, African, Australian Aboriginals into a big pile of "other". I especially enjoyed the aside about the frozen north and the shared ideas about religion and starvation (Anyone out there coming down on the "starvation is great" side?). To make it worse this is a recent imprint. To be fair, it gave us lots to talk about. Just not in the way we planned.
The other book I read was "Wisdom of our First Nations". This is part of a series on first nations personalities. Each chapter introduces an Elder, their history and work, and their lessons. It is sometimes a bit hard to read as the author has tried to reflect the speech patterns of the specific elders. I really like this approach, but it can be challenging as a reader who is used to one bland voice. There appears to be good representation between male and female Elders and Elders from different tribes. This is a young adult book, but I enjoyed learning more about what indigenous people are doing on turtle island and how they have used their own gifts.
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