A review by read_all_nite
The Naked Now by Richard Rohr

3.0

Here we go again. I liked parts of this book, but, once again, I found the quality of arguments uneven,and pointedly male (for example, his definition of suffering is "lack of control"). He makes some assumptions about fundamentalists (and I'm not sure if he's talking about "fundamentalists" or lumping all evangelicals in with fundamentalists) that I found to be facile--like, all fundamentalists are dualistic thinkers with nary a mystic bone in their bodies. Clearly, he's never been to a camp meeting. He even says some stupid stuff, like, we didn't have a word for nondualistic thinking until--I don't remember; some extremely recent time--which is baloney, because there have always been words for that--like unity or wholeness, for instance. So his thinking is a bit sloppy at times. He attributes Flatland to Ken Wilbur, but it's written by Edwin Abbott. And he often makes rather arbitrary definitions of things, which is a rather annoying habit. Nonetheless, I did like a lot of what he had to say about how to take a more mystical approach to life in the 21st Century. It is a huge topic, and he did pretty well to take it on in this short, but densely packed volume.