Good morning, all! It’s going to be a short Salon this week, as I have to head out to purchase myself a new laptop. My old IBM ThinkPad, which has done good service for years, has finally bitten the dust.
This has proved to be a productive week, as I finished two books and one review. John Dougill’s In Search of Japan’s Hidden Christians proved to be as interesting as I’d hoped. The review can be found here. Pursuing the subject of Christianity in Japan a little further, next up is Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence (I’ll also be taking another look at the 1971 film of the novel, directed by Masahiro Shinoda, right afterwards), as well as a compact disc set of music from the time of St. Francis Xavier, the Jesuit missionary who first brought Christianity to Japan as well as to many other areas in south and east Asia. Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness is also a very worthwhile read for those who are interested in her books, as she talks about her years in a convent, how she came to be a writer, and how she discovered compassion to be a major focus for her activities.
Thirty-Two Minutes 