I’ve usually got at least two books going at once — a novel for bedtime and fun, and some sort of non-fiction book. This week, I finished one of each, and in each I found a quotable quote that I really wanted to share.

The first is from The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. If you haven’t read it, I do recommend it. This is a murder mystery set in a slightly alternate reality, in which a large number of European Jews were resettled into Alaska during World War II, and now in present day are about to be kicked out. It’s slowish in parts, but worth reading.

Landsman taps the wheel, considering his promises and their worth. He was never unfaithful to Bina. But there is no doubt that what broke the marriage was Landsman’s lack of faith. A faith not in God, nor in Bina and her character, but in the fundamental precept that everything befalling them from the moment they met, good and bad, was meant to be.

The second quote is from A Generous Orthodoxy, by Brian D. McLaren. McLaren is a leader in the emerging church movement, and is also considered a heretic by many. Personally, I like the way he writes about God and faith. I think there’s a lot of truth in there. For instance, this:

This insight into true “having” intensifies, by the way, the tragedy of consumerism; one acquires more and more things without taking the time to ever see and know them, and thus one never truly enjoys them. One has without truly having. The consumer is right — there is pleasure to be had in good things, a sacred and almost unspeakable pleasure, but the consumer wrongly thinks that one finds this pleasure by having more and more possessions instead of by possessing them more truly through grateful contemplation. And here we are, living in an economy that perpetuates this tragedy.

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