this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Fiction Books
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
It's a story about a seagull who defies the expectations society has put on him and learns to fly high into the heavens to reach his highest potential.
Vanessa still considers herself culturally Jewish, but she doesn't turn to the Torah for lessons on how to live a good life, or as a place to explore existential questions about why we are here.
Instead, she extracts that kind of spiritual meaning from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" and other beloved novels (she also co-hosts a podcast called "Harry Potter and the Sacred Text).
A professor of hers at Harvard Divinity School encouraged her to try to read secular works of literature this way, and it opened up something beautiful and profound for her - the ability to create deep spiritual meaning in unexpected places.
And from that we met people all over the world who said things like "I reread this Harry Potter book every year on the anniversary of my mother's death."
And having studied the book more closely, I was like, "oh, Bertha is Black, and this white man marries her for her money and then locks her in an attic and tells everyone she's crazy.
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