Day: August 26, 2007

A new, innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years, provides the spiritual counterpoint to a life known mostly through its works. The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”

A lot will be made of this on both sides of the pro- and anti-God sides of the aisle, but I can’t help just feel a little sad for the woman, who clearly yearned to feel the presence of God in her life, and also feel a little humbled by the fact that she continued for fifty-some years without it.

• I saw Superbad this afternoon. It’s sort of juvenile, but…well, that’s sort of the point, isn’t it? It’s very funny, sometimes surprisingly sweet, and a lot of fun.
• Before the show, I saw the trailer for the upcoming Dane Cook movie Good Luck Chuck. I’d seen a trailer for this one before, but… Well, check out the 5/8/07 trailer here, and then compare it to the 8/8/07 “exclusive trailer” on the same page. Do those even look like the same movie? Neither of them looks like a movie I’d particularly like to see, so I guess it’s sort of moot.
• I was digging around the IMDB and discovered that there have been twelve Land Before Time movies. Twelve?

But I probably only had that thought knowing I was going to write a review and might have to produce clever, negative things to say.

Criticism, when done well, is an important tool and invaluable at opening up a dialogue about the books that we read. But it’s true that it can sometimes get hung up on things that the average reader, which is to say the reader not writing a book review, is perfectly content to let slide or completely miss.