cover image Lifecraft CL

Lifecraft CL

Forrest Church. Beacon Press (MA), $20 (160pp) ISBN 978-0-8070-7712-2

Church, senior minister at the distinguished All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan, serves up some thoughtful, brief meditations on making life more meaningful. In Unitarian fashion, the book is replete with provisional, qualified statements about God and acknowledgments of the contextualized nature of all truth. There's no dogma here; readers will find gentle anecdotes drawn from Western philosophy, music and art, as well as from Church's own life and experience. The son of a U.S. senator and the grandson (on his mother's side) of the governor of Idaho, the once-agnostic Church surprised himself and his family by choosing parish ministry as his vocation. He states that life becomes more meaningful when we intentionally divide it up into various projects--the parenting project, the career project, the God project, and so on--and prioritize those based on our own situations. Those situations will change, and we must change with them, Church asserts, citing a touching example of a professional football player who quit the NFL to spend time with his terminally ill preschool-age son. At the book's close, Church prods those who feel stuck in a rut to simply ""turn the page,"" much as readers who find themselves reading the same paragraph many times without paying attention need to move on. Church does not offer earth-shattering advice here, but readers will be comforted and perhaps challenged by his call for self-examination. (May)