Our passage from the Word of God today is 1 Kings 11:41 which reads: "Now the rest of the acts of Solomon and whatever he did, and his wisdom, are they not written in the book of the acts of Solomon?"
Our quote today is from C. S. Lewis. He said: "Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life, and you will save it."
In this podcast, we are using as our texts: "Literature and Spirituality" by Yaw Adu-Gyamfi and Mark Ray Schmidt, and "Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing" by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. If you enjoy this podcast, please feel free to purchase any one of these books from our website.
Our first topic for today is "Spirituality as Quest, Part 1 - Buddha" from the book, "Literature and Spirituality" by Yaw Adu-Gyamfi and Mark Ray Schmidt.
Siddhartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, or the Enlightened One, is the founder of the Buddhist religion. Buddha lived in India about twenty-five hundred years ago. There are many legends about his life, but it his teachings that are most important and most interesting. Among the records of Buddha's teaching is Dhammapada, which is a collection of 423 verses organized into 26 topics (or chapters). Dhammapada refers to the path to virtue or the path of correct living. This collection gives a general sense of Buddhism, but there is much more to this tradition.
...
Our second topic for today is "Reading a Story, Part 5" from the book, "Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing" by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia.
Elements of Fable: The brief story of "The Appointment in Samarra", which I read in podcast episode #4, seems practically all skin and bones; that is, it contains little decoration. For in a fable everything leads directly to the moral, or message, sometimes stated at the end (an example moral is: "Haste makes waste"). In "The Appointment in Samarra" the moral isn't stated outright, it is merely implied.
...