Practice Resurrection: And Other Essays

by Erik Reece

Overview

A student of Wendell Berry and Guy Davenport, Erik Reece is a strong and eloquent voice for a new generation of dedicated activists fighting on behalf of the embattled wilderness and the future of our planet. A master of the personal essay, his work has also deeply explored the role of religion in the American family.

In Reece’s new collection of essays, Practice Resurrection, ideas are the main characters. Written over ten years, and revealing Reece’s continued obsession with religion, family and the natural world, in many ways these essays represent a sequel to his stirring memoir, An American Gospel: On Family, History and the Kingdom of God. In that book, Reece intimately describes his conflicted relationship with Christianity in the context of the death of his father, a Baptist minister from rural Virginia who committed suicide at age thirty-three, and Reece’s own journey since then to find meaning and balance in the material and spiritual worlds.

Approaching variably through the lenses of travel, economics, and environmental stewardship, and with the ideas of great American thinkers (Thoreau, Berry, Davenport, Emerson) echoing in the background, Practice Resurrection provide readers refreshing new ways to value human spirituality and the natural environment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619026087
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Erik Reece is Davenport's literary executor. He lives in Lexington, KY.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Notes from a Very Small Island 3

Stylist Needed: Remembering Guy Davenport 25

Instead of the Ten Commandments 45

Birding with Wendell Berry 52

A Week on the Kentucky River Reading Henry David Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Which Nobody Reads Anymore (But Should) 64

In the Land of Rock and Sky 106

Lionspeak 126

Practice Resurrection 135

The Circulatory System: A Manifesto 143

Flight Risk: A Journal from the One Hundredth Year of Human Aviation 157

The New Creationism 173

Speak and Bear Witness 187

Eight Drafts of a Suicide Note 197

Acknowledgments 214

Editorial Reviews

01/09/2017
Reece (An American Gospel) superimposes the title of one of his finest treatises on this anthology of 15 essays that delve into his conflicted relationship with Christianity and thoughts on environmental stewardship, among other topics. Reece, raised by a Baptist minister, refashioned his beliefs over many years to differ substantially from his forefathers’—which preached that Christ’s resurrection mattered more than his life—and, instead, proposes to readers a religion of experience. Poignant topics, such as the new creationism, the circulatory system, and “lionspeak,” reflect his life: poet, professor, essayist, naturalist, conservationist, birding friend of Wendell Berry, and executor of poet Guy Davenport’s estate. While some of the essays address a straightforward topic, others meander and find their footing when Reece details his thought process. For example, “Flight Risk” starts on the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ flight, before moving to France to approach the apocryphal Acts of Peter, then to Simon Magus, and finally to the Daniel Boone Forest near Reece’s home in eastern Kentucky. “The work of... writers I most admire is telling a truth that exposes a lie.” The same could be said about Reece’s fine collection, which will interest readers grappling with how to think of their faith in an environmentally precarious world. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"With his singular wit and pith, environmental writer Reece explores issues such as God, Christianity, the environment (of course), and his father’s suicide in essays rife with sentient turns of phrase and exceptionally insightful passages...few are better than [Reece] is at discussing a personal crisis of faith—although he prefers to say his religion “vanished like a mist off the creek”—in such authentic language. For Reece, universal truth is personal." —Starred Booklist


"[A] fine collection, which will interest readers grappling with how to think of their faith in an environmentally precarious world." —Publishers Weekly



"[D]elightful and illuminating. Reece's insightful, witty, and reflective essays offer up new ways of thinking about spirituality, culture, and the environment." —Kirkus


Praise for An American Gospel: On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God

Written with a scholar’s precision but in frank, readable prose, the book advances an optimistic, intellectual, environmentalist reclamation of sacred Christian beliefs and of Americans’ complex relationship with Jesus. — Kirkus Review

"Sometimes religious inspiration can come from the most unlikely places...[Reece] intercalates his personal story, which is one of great tragedy, with those of [the] great historical figures. His goal is not quite clear from the outset, but that is the point. He is searching for a form of Christianity that he can live with."—Publishers Weekly

"Erik Reece’s An American Gospel is a rich and poignant memoir of the author’s theological grappling...The story he tells here is one that will resonate with many in the postmodern generations, pointing the way past that place where religion has broke down for the final time is left discarded on the side of the road." — The Englewood Review of Books

From the Publisher

2016-11-23
Religion, ecology, literature, family, and ideas all commingle in this collection.The shadow of the prolific writer Guy Davenport (1927-2005) quietly hovers over these sharp, incisive, and opinionated pieces by Reece (Writer in Residence/Univ. of Kentucky; Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America's Most Radical Idea, 2016, etc.), who's also Davenport's literary executor. In form, some echo Davenport's favorite "assemblages" or metafictive gatherings. "Nine Drafts of a Suicide Note" beautifully weaves together reflections on the Tate Gallery's Rothko Room, with its nine massive canvases of "corpuscular hues of blood and wine," Nietzsche, James Baldwin, and the suicide of Reece's father. "Maxims and Errors" offers up bits of wisdom like: "Take the gods out of the sky. Put them back in the forest. Now we are getting somewhere." Many channel the works of Thoreau, Whitman, and Wendell Berry. The longest piece is about Reece building a wooden boat and canoeing the Kentucky River for a week while daily reading a book he turns to frequently, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a "fascinating," "maddening" and "unclassifiable text." "Instead of the Ten Commandments" takes on some calls for them being prominently posted in public spaces. Reece has an alternative: Whitman's poem "Laws for Creations." It's "shorter" and it "never mentions the word not." One essay about a birding adventure with Berry considers the "possibility that a broken world can be made whole" with imagination. A lovely piece on Davenport honors the "master artificer" whose "writing was a high wire act in every sense." Reece calls him the "greatest prose stylist of his generation." Here are the Wright brothers viewed in the light of the French poet Blaise Cendrars or talking lions joining forces with Wittgenstein and Jesus. Despite occasional repetitions, these are delightful and illuminating. Reece's insightful, witty, and reflective essays offer up new ways of thinking about spirituality, culture, and the environment.

Kirkus Reviews

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