Marginal Mennonite Society
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Happy 73rd birthday, Barbara Brown Taylor (born Sept. 21, 1951).
Episcopal priest. Feminist. Teacher. Writer. Ecumenist. Graduate of Emory University (1973). Graduate of Yale Divinity School (1976).
In the 1980s, Barbara was the rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church in Clarksville, Georgia. She later left the ministry and accepted an invitation to join the religion department at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia.
Her experiences teaching a world religions class at Piedmont resulted in her book "Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others" (2019).
Her other books include: "Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith" (2007), "An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith" (2009), and "Learning to Walk in the Dark" (2014).
Born in Lafayette, Indiana. Lives in Georgia.
~The Marginal Mennonite Society Heroes Series
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Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others Paperback – 24 March 2020
by Barbara Brown Taylor (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 1,623 ratings
New York Times Bestseller
The renowned and beloved New York Times bestselling author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark recounts her moving discoveries of finding the sacred in unexpected places while teaching the world's religions to undergraduates in rural Georgia, revealing how God delights in confounding our expectations.
Barbara Brown Taylor continues her spiritual journey begun in Leaving Church of finding out what the world looks like after taking off her clergy collar. In Holy Envy, she contemplates the myriad ways other people and traditions encounter the Transcendent, both by digging deeper into those traditions herself and by seeing them through her students' eyes as she sets off with them on field trips to monasteries, temples, and mosques.
Troubled and inspired by what she learns, Taylor returns to her own tradition for guidance, finding new meaning in old teachings that have too often been used to exclude religious strangers instead of embracing the divine challenges they present. Re-imagining some central stories from the religion she knows best, she takes heart in how often God chooses outsiders to teach insiders how out-of-bounds God really is.
Throughout Holy Envy, Taylor weaves together stories from the classroom with reflections on how her own spiritual journey has been complicated and renewed by connecting with people of other traditions--even those whose truths are quite different from hers. The one constant in her odyssey is the sense that God is the one calling her to disown her version of God--a change that ultimately enriches her faith in other human beings and in God.
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Print length
256 pages
Review
"At a time when many people are entrenched behind the walls of familiar traditions, this book is a literal godsend." -- Retailing Insight
"This indispensable book guides us through America's rapidly diversifying religious landscape, highlighting resonances between different religions, narrating moments of spiritual inspiration, and always emphasizing moments of human connection." -- Eboo Patel, author of Out of Many Faiths
"Engrossing, delightful...In short, it is a timely and important book." -- Psychological Perspectives
"I've long wanted a book like this to be written. And Barbara Brown Taylor is the perfect guide to finding God in other faiths. Her new book reminds us that God is bigger than any one religion. Prepare to come to know God in a new way." -- James Martin, SJ, author of Jesus: A Pilgrimage
"There are few people writing today who I esteem more highly than Barbara Brown Taylor. In an age in which religion sometimes seems weaponized, furthering the distance between us, I can't think of a more important offering than this beautiful book." -- Shauna Niequist, New York Times best-selling author of Present Over Perfect
"In showing up for the complex beauty of all the world's great wisdom traditions, Barbara finds her way home to her own faith. Among the finest memoirs I have ever read of the life of a teacher." -- Mirabai Starr, author of God of Love
"Taylor nudges her students away from spiritual appropriation and comparison, moving them instead toward challenging discernment of their faith and the faith of others. Taylor, like the best faith leaders, is a great storyteller. . . . Highly recommended." -- Booklist (starred review)
"In Holy Envy, once again, Barbara Brown Taylor does not disappoint with this capacious engagement of our religious and spiritual neighbors. The book is like a breath of fresh air that scatters the dust off the surface of my faith, and I am rejuvenated and hopeful." -- Mihee Kim-Kort, author of Outside the Lines
"In simple and sharp prose, Taylor, a former Episcopal priest who teaches religion at Piedmont College in Athens, Ga., explores how teaching an introductory religion course has influenced her own views on faith and Christianity...[a] fluid book." -- Publishers Weekly
"Taylor acknowledges that none of us has a corner on the transcendent, that we each have something to give and receive while remaining true to our faith. She reminds us that religion is more than beliefs, that it involves our deepest selves and is the fabric of our shared lives." -- Library Journal
"Taylor asks us to see these other ways of approaching a mysterious divine, to embrace 'the God just beyond our understanding.' . . . she writes with an authenticity and self-awareness that few non-fiction books possess." -- Spectrum magazine
"Heartfelt, thoughtful, and beautifully written, Taylor's book will give readers who are undertaking their own spiritual journeys a sense of purpose and perspective." -- BookPage
"Taylor is by any measure a glorious writer. . . . Her willingness to explore new worlds of meaning and her high respect for all faiths offer a noble example." -- Spirituality and Health
About the Author
Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller An Altar in the World and Leaving Church, which received an Author of the Year award from the Georgia Writers Association. Taylor is the Butman Professor of Religion at Piedmont College, where she has taught since 1998. She lives on a working farm in rural northeast Georgia with her husband, Ed.
Product details
Publisher : HarperOne (24 March 2020)
Language : English
Paperback : 256 pages
ISBN-10 : 0062406574
ISBN-13 : 978-0062406576
Dimensions : 13.49 x 1.47 x 20.32 cmBest Sellers Rank: 295,582 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)145 in Jewish Theology
628 in Comparative Religion
901 in DevotionalsCustomer Reviews:
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 1,623 ratings
RUJustWondering
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant!!
Reviewed in Canada on 19 November 2023
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I had been waiting with great anticipation to read Holy Envy for some time. It was exciting to finally get to sit down with it & read Taylor’s profound thoughts & experiences while teaching Interfaith & religion to the younger generations.
There was so much affirmation in these pages to the similar experiences I have had over the years while building relationships with both the main stream & new religious movements in my city.
Holy Envy should be required reading for all & I must say, the epilogue was nothing short of genius!! I look forward to discussing this book in the years ahead with groups in my area!!
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Sherri
5.0 out of 5 stars What a great book!
Reviewed in the United States on 29 May 2024
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This book taught me alot about other religions, myself and other people. Very well written. I found it very interesting and would highly recommend it!
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lasynch
5.0 out of 5 stars A Glimpse into a life of faith?
Reviewed in the United States on 1 April 2019
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For some unknown reason, I had not visited her web site before - (barbarabrowntaylor.com).
“Hello, I’m Barbara Brown Taylor. I say things you’re not supposed to say.”
Then follows a quote from TIME magazine that compares her spiritual nonfiction (in its poetic power) to that of C. S. Lewis and Frederick Buechner. Then follow pictures of the covers of her four latest books and then a tab for more books. Then a short biosketch that lists some of her most recent kudos (same as the one here on Amazon).
Was it unholy envy that I experienced? Maybe, maybe not. I certainly felt sad when I saw all this, for I am somewhat of a fan and have read almost all her books. I recognized quickly (and I hope correctly) that her web site is probably the work of a publicist who has convinced her that this is the way to sell a lot of books and get lots of speaking engagements – to tell the world how acclaimed and accomplished you are, how influential you have been through your writing and lectures.
Forgive me if I am wrong, but this is not who Barbara Brown Taylor really is, deep down, unless what she has written over the past decades in hundreds of pages is a cover for a quite different personality than shines through in them, including the most recent book (Holy Envy). I ordered Holy Envy from Amazon the day it was released.
The BBT I meet in this book is a gentle child of God, unsure of how to assimilate and integrate what she stumbles on when she embarks on teaching Religion 101 at Piedmont College, despite all the credentials and honorific titles she brings. She communicates beautifully the doubts and hesitation that you encounter when you begin teaching, and plunge into topics that involve major religions of the world that you have never really explored in depth. If you are honest and open minded, you find that you have begun a wrestling match with God, even though you may not have thought of it that way. Of course you are no match for G-d (neither was Jacob), and years of wrestling leave you exhausted at times, exhilarated at others. Finally, your brain is scrambled and body is tired and you realize that your years of active wrestling are limited. It is time to fall back onto somewhat familiar territory, even though the landscape may have changed quite a bit in all the time that you spent wrestling and learning a few basic facts and ideas. For you attempted to explore topics that have taken hundreds of years and millions of lives and “books” to evolve into their present state.
The book is full of lovely memories and experiences as well as unsettling ones, giving a glimpse into the complexities and difficulties of tackling living, active faiths and religions. You emerge with anecdotes but you realize how little you truly know and understand, even when you are hailed as one of the most influential thinkers in the world!
The chapter on Holy Envy towards the beginning of the book introduces Krister Stendahl to the reader along with his three rules of religious understanding. This alone made my purchase of the book worthwhile. This book is not an introduction to the major religions of the world. Huston Smith’s book (World Religions) is excellent, and BBT recommends it here. When I read that book many decades ago in an earlier incarnation, it made me want to become a follower of each of the faiths it described in its chapters. You could tell right away that Smith had followed Krister Stendahl’s rules; even better, he was a person who had actually immersed himself in the faith for a prolonged period of time before attempting to write about it.
There are also nuggets such as the ones in the chapters (towards the end) about being Born Again and Divine Diversity where BBT tackles passages from scripture and expresses ideas that make you think all over again about stories that you were puzzled by at some time. Here one gets a glimpse of the BBT that one saw in her earlier books of sermons; those were scattered with lynx-eyed observations and unexpected perspectives. I usually ended reading those with tears in my eyes.
Holy Envy does mention instances where people underwent transformations they may not have foreseen as a result of encountering different faiths. My personal experience was a transformation from a staunch atheist to a follower of Jesus in midlife. It was Jesus who opened my eyes and heart to other faiths and made me understand that he himself appears often as a stranger to people who call themselves Christians.
May people of different faiths learn to live together in peace and harmony. In the words of an Irish sage (John O’Donohue)
May the space between us be blessed with peace and joy
May the nourishment of the earth be yours.
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours.
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Anne Gowans Blinn
5.0 out of 5 stars it will open our minds, heal the separation between religious traditions...
Reviewed in Canada on 28 March 2019
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Barbara Brown Taylor is a wonderful author...I learn so much from her writing for she explains things so well...the flow of her writing pulls you into the message...she also has a wonderful sense of humor...a great writing style and she is a wise teacher...
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JOCELYN
5.0 out of 5 stars Good read
Reviewed in Canada on 6 November 2020
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Good read, seeing other sides!
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Chris
5.0 out of 5 stars thought provoking
Reviewed in the United States on 17 March 2024
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A beautifully written and thought-provoking work. Excellent read for anyone in the Christian faith looking to better understand their own faith and the faiths of others
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Paul A. Laughlin
4.0 out of 5 stars I Have Other Sheep in the Fold!!!!
Reviewed in Canada on 21 June 2022
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Faith is not a competitive sport with one mainly white only winner.
Sadly today that is the motto in most of western society.
We ,from the pulpits deny that there could be other sheep or folds but only my church,my dogmas and my creeds. I have all the knowledge and we have the only gate.
Here, she looks outside our box and examines what the other sheep really are. From both learning and direct contact.-our best to their best.
" The God of our understanding is just that: The God of our understanding. We need the God just outside of our understanding!!!"
Spirituality is the active pursuit of God, the God we did not make up.
Her story is for many our story from inside the church out
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Jane Marshall
4.0 out of 5 stars Good book
Reviewed in the United States on 20 August 2024
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Very thought provoking but only read if you have an open mind.
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Susan Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book.
Reviewed in Canada on 9 May 2019
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Love Barbara Brown-Taylors books and her style of preaching.
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CHRISTOPHER W. KEATING
5.0 out of 5 stars A solid contribution to Barbara Brown Taylor's work
Reviewed in the United States on 23 June 2019
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Barbara Brown Taylor's most recent book, Holy Envy, is a glimpse into the college classrooms where she taught world religion for more than 20 years. Or rather, perhaps it is a glimpse into her study where she reflects on the work of building bridges between different faith groups. In her words, “Part of my ongoing priesthood is to find the bridge between my faith and the faiths of other people so that those of us who draw water from wells on different sides of the river can still get together from time to time, making the whole area safer for our children.”
Holy Envy explores those rivers, revealing the joy Taylor found as she encountered different faiths. Navigating these tributaries took her beyond stereotypes and left her with a deeper appreciation for the religious practices of Buddhists, Muslims, and Jews. At times she wonders if she might stay on the other side of the river and not return to Christianity. But she plunges forward, and the result is a stunning book. Her evokes dialogue, making this a solid choice for church reading groups or book clubs. Those churches fishing for the millennials or the ever-elusive spiritual but not religious cohort would do well to give consideration to Taylor's thoughtful reflections.
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Ircel Harrison
5.0 out of 5 stars Learning as Spiritual Formation
Reviewed in the United States on 20 December 2021
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When I grow up, I want to be like Barbara Brown Taylor. I long ago realized that Taylor is one of the finest Christian writers of our time but reading Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others reminded me of the humility and inquisitiveness that makes her work engaging.
This book recounts not only Taylor’s experience of teaching world religions to undergraduate students in a liberal arts college, but her own growing understanding of what it means to learn from other faiths, embrace truths that enrich one’s own spiritual journey, and wonder how far “holy envy” can be indulged without becoming covetous! Simply put, holy envy is discovering that another’s faith tradition may provide something that is missing in one’s own.
Early in the book, Taylor quotes the late Krister Stendahl’s three rules of religious engagement:
When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.
Don’t compare your best to their worst.
Leave room for holy envy.
Taylor attempted to adhere to these rules in her teaching of world religions—exposing her students to practitioners of various faiths, give other traditions an unbiased reading, and being open to learn something that might strengthen one’s own faith. Her accounts of the first action are engaging and sometimes amusing. The second and third steps had as much impact on Taylor as on her students.
As she pursued her own journey in relationship to other traditions, she began asking these questions:
What does it mean to be a person of faith in a world of many faiths?
If God is revealed in many ways, why follow the Christian way?
Is Christian faith primarily about being Christian or becoming more fully human?
How does loving Jesus equip me to love those who do not love him the way I do?
What do religious strangers reveal to me about God?
In the Epilogue, Taylor recounts that she eventually gave up teaching world religions as a course. She became aware of the impossibility of really engaging other religions in a fifteen-week course. The best she could do was “desiccate them, reducing each to its skeletal outline with enough names and dates to anchor a ten-point quiz.” She became convicted that religion as such could only be understand by engaging with religious persons who incarnate a faith tradition.
Holy Envy is a gift and invitation. The gift is walking with Taylor through her own journey of discovery. The invitation is to embark on our own journey.
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Marlene Holst
5.0 out of 5 stars Developing an Interfaith Spirituality
Reviewed in Canada on 30 March 2019
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CC
5.0 out of 5 stars A great one to read and share
Reviewed in the United States on 11 December 2023
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I’ve now bought 3-4 and have recommended to numerous people…including comparative religion classes at high school.
I thought I knew about other religions…found that I didn’t. This comes with the added precious benefit of patience, love and compassion…even for those of “our own” faith.
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Margie M
5.0 out of 5 stars Well written, uplifting, inclusive book
Reviewed in the United States on 24 December 2023
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I recommend this book for anyone who is looking to strengthen their own faith, while at the same time gaining respect for and understanding of people of other faiths. It has sparked lively conversations at my book club at church.
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Sheila Anderson
4.0 out of 5 stars Well written and informative
Reviewed in the United States on 25 July 2023
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I like that the author is willing to put her own thoughts and feelings out there. Very enjoyable read, thought provoking
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davidjordan84
5.0 out of 5 stars Her best yet
Reviewed in the United States on 23 March 2019
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As an enthusiastic reader of all this author’s work, it isn’t even a little surprising that I love this one as much as I do. Brown Taylor’s spiritual journey is reminiscent of my own, and I found much to appreciate in the way she describes her devotion to and preference for the Christian faith in which she has flourished, while simultaneously expanding her knowledge of and appreciation for other religions and their means for attempting to define and worship a dine being. The broadening of her religious mind that has come as a result of her interaction with people of radically different religious faiths (even other Christians) has allowed her to appreciate and envy the most meaningful and beautiful aspects of others’ devout faith.
It’s a wonderful book that is encouraging to the evolving faith of the contemporary Christian who wants to be more “authentically human” in the experience of receiving and sharing the life-changing love of God. This is one of those titles that will stick with me as I attempt to exemplify the values of the generous Christian in a multicultural, multi-religious, and ever changing spiritual world.
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C. Simmons
5.0 out of 5 stars excellent
Reviewed in the United States on 14 April 2023
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This one captured me full on. I DO admire people of other faiths. It’s amazing how alike we are. It makes me sick that those in power push so hard at our differences to divide us. We are all humans just trying to worship as we know how. Ms. Brown is quickly rising to the top of my list of spiritual directors.
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Laurie
5.0 out of 5 stars Humble, Profound, Enlightening
Reviewed in the United States on 13 April 2019
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I always wanted to take a college level class on the great religions of the world. When I saw an advertisement for this book, I decided it was the next best thing. Now that I have read it, I hardly know what to say. The author is Episopalian, a former practicing priest, and for 20 years a teacher of Religion 101 at a private Christian liberal arts college. I would say her primary messages are that (1) there is something to love about all religions and (2) how you live is more important than what you believe. It is so much more than that, but how can you explain such a profound book in a short space? What I am most moved by, though, is her humble presentation and continuing quest to understand God. She doesn't proclaim to be an all-knowing authority on anything; just a normal person trying to be the best human she can be. Wow -- so glad I read it. Barbara Brown Taylor, you are my new hero.
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PJNuttleman
5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening and affirming
Reviewed in the United States on 25 April 2023
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I've often wrestled with certain aspects of my faith and have had tremendous curiosity about other faiths. This book was a great look into other faiths and helped me to understand that it is OK that I don't understand or even necessarily agree with all aspects of my faith. The journey with an open mind brings the possibility for deeper understanding and builds bridges.
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Katelyn Beaty
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February 17, 2020
I’ll start by saying that the aims of this book are admirable, given Western Christians’ general ignorance of what people of other faith traditions believe and/or their unwillingness to learn. I absolutely think there’s so much good that other traditions illuminate and that Christians can honor without feeling threatened or that they have to give up their own beliefs and practices. I am very much on board with the premise of this book!
Having said this, it struck me that HOLY ENVY provided a surface treatment of the four non-Christian faiths it sets out to honor. Taylor spends little time explaining the beliefs of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam. Instead, the book explores each through field trips taken by Taylor’s Religion 101 class. I love the idea of learning about religions through spending time with its adherents. But the overall effect seems to suggest that beliefs—core truth-claims about the nature of God, humanity, reality, the material vs. spiritual world—don’t really matter, as long as you are becoming a good, loving person adhering to them.
The effect is that Taylor fails to seriously grapple with the *particularity* of other religions—which, in my view, is not honoring its adherents. The notion that all religions are several paths up one holy mountain does not honor the exclusive truth claims of many of the world’s religions, including those observed here. It doesn't make sense, for example, to claim that Hinduism and Islam are two streams leading to the same ocean; so fundamentally different are each’s teachings, they are more like separate oceans unto themselves. Ironically, by finding much to honor in other religions, Taylor in my view doesn’t really *see* other religions for what they are. The result is a kind of diminishment of the uniqueness of other religions in favor of more generalized practices of love and kindness that happen to accord well with a white educated Western worldview.
Finally—and this highlights why I’ve never been a huge BBT fan, although I know and respect plenty of people who are—throughout this book, references are made to a *type* of Christian over and against which Taylor defines her own spirituality. Those Christians are too dogmatic; they haven’t done enough higher criticism so they are thus ignorantly literalist when reading the Bible; they’re just a bit too obsessed with Jesus and the cross. They are too fearful. Taylor recounts several anecdotes in this book of Christians who serve as a foil to a more enlightened Christianity, one the author claims as her own. I kind of want to say: Do your thing, Barbara! No one at this point in your career is going to confuse you for these other Christians. Why the need to define your faith as over and against? To be fair, toward the end of the book Taylor grapples with her own impatience with other Christians; I guess for someone of Taylor’s clout and eloquence, I’d expect a bit more love and tolerance—the very qualities she admires in other religions.
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Michael Austin
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March 31, 2019
Barbara Brown Taylor is perhaps the best thinker and writer that I ever blew the chance to hear live. Several years ago, I attended a conference at which she and Miroslov Volf were the featured speakers. Volf was the opening plenary speaker, and Taylor was the closing plenary speaker. I was not familiar with Taylor at the time, and I had a fairly small menu of flights to choose from when I booked the flight. So I chose an evening flight back home that required me to miss the closing session. To make up for it, I bought An Altar in the World and read it in the flight. By the time I landed, I realized what a mistake I had made.
Since then, I have come to see Barbara Brown Taylor as an indispensable Christian writer. She combines depth and clarity, which are two traits that are rarely found together in any kind of writing. Other Christian writers I admire are deep without being clear (Miroslov Volf, for example) and clear without being particularly deep (Rachel Held Evans fills this category for me). Taylor is both. She has enough theological sophistication to write profound--and unread--treatises for fellow academics. But she writes like, well, a writer. And a really good one.
Even though I knew this about her--her book Learning to Walk in the Dark was one of the best things that I read last year--I was fully prepared not to like Holy Envy. I don’t much like the term to begin with. Almost every time I have heard it used, it describes a sort of religious tourism that either 1) overly romanticizes distant religious practices (“look at all those noble savages worshipping God in their state of nature”) or just assumes that everything that another culture does is inherently superior to our own (“why can’t my Church look like the Sistine Chapel and have music by Bach?”) . Both of these attitudes drive me nuts.
Not only does Taylor not adopt these attitudes. She tackles them head on and talks about the ethics of learning from other people’s religions. We cannot simply appropriate other people’s beliefs into our own--lifting them from their original context and adding them to our spiritual practice to show how open-minded we are. I mean, we can, but it is not a very ethical way to treat others. Holy Envy is not the same thing as spiritual imperialism. Taylor calls this "spiritual shoplifting," and it is not a good thing.
Brown works out a much more nuanced approach. She grounds herself firmly in the Christian tradition, while, at the same time, acknowledging that this tradition is not uniquely or exclusively representative of God’s will. This is a very tricky position to occupy, since it involves reading against a fair bit of that tradition itself and very carefully interpreting its sacred texts. But she pulls it off and says something like (and I am paraphrasing here), “I am a Christian, and this is the context in which I experience God. It is a beautiful tradition, and I believe that it can lead me to God. But it is a tradition that works for people who have a specific set of experiences--and there are equally valid traditions that can lead people in different who experience the world differently to the same God, who is too big to be captured in any particular aspect.”
Learning from other traditions, then, requires empathy, understanding, respect, and a lot of effort. It requires us to learn what other people believe, why they believe these things, and what aspect of God they address. When we do this, we can see some of the gaps in our understanding that grow out gaps in our experiences. A religion is basically a set of narratives that help us make sense of our relationship to things that are outside of ourselves--including divinity, nature, history, the universe, and other people. These are such big things that no set of narratives can say everything (or even most things) about them. So there is value in understanding the ways that other people, and other cultures, try to grapple with the “big questions.” They are big questions precisely because they support many answers.
Perhaps the best metaphor for how Taylor sees religion is language. We all learn a language, and most of us are more comfortable using our own language than one we learned from others. However, learning another language can help us see things differently and understand concepts that we could never quite make clear in our own language. And usually, understanding another language teaches us things about our own language. (I never really understood how the subjunctive worked in English until I tried to learn how it works in Spanish). As Taylor puts it, “As natural as it may be to try to translate everything into my own religious language, I miss a lot when I persist in reducing everything to my own frame of reference” (34). Learning from the faith of others is very similar to learning from the language of others. And neither one can really be done without going to new places and meeting new people.
The main body of the book is highly reflective memoir of Taylor’s experiences teaching a Survey of World Religion course to students at Piedmont College. A typical semester involved teaching five major world religions: Hinduism Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. She documents her experiences with mainly Christian students encountering these religions for the first time. She addresses some of the aspects of these religions that have helped her supplement blind spots in her own point of view: the Muslim relationship to prayer, for example, or the Hindu embrace of multiple spiritual paths.
But she presents this as real work, not a tourist's vacation. We have to understand, not just the religions, but the people who practice them. She also flips the lens at the end of the book and shows the things about Christianity that can teach things to people of other faiths. Because this really isn’t a book about learning from other religions at all. It is a book about learning from other people who have religions. It is part of having humility and learning to love other people and to see them as fully human moral agents whose interactions with the divine are as valid and important as our own.
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Sarah
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March 25, 2024
I’ve always been the jealous sort, which is something I’m working on. I don’t have problems giving space, or even letting go of one sort of love to embrace another. I do - however - have problems letting go.
I’m essentially still in love with the first woman to lasso my heart, and the same is true for the first man. I’m just not built for leaving.
Said another way, I’m jealous for the finish line. For a lifetime of loving, regardless of impracticality and - as regards my first female love - laughable incompatibility.
This holds true with the God I’ve known from my mother’s womb. The one who sent his son to die as a gesture of humility & love for his own creation.
I do transcendental meditation twice a day when I can. Every alternate day of the week, I intentionally commune with the feminine divine in place of the masculine father I was raised to imagine. I do Buddhist chants to release suffering. I read sacred texts from the 5 “major” religions, and I constantly ask people to teach me how they encounter God in ways I don’t yet understand.
But at the end of the day, I’m a lot like this author, whispering goodnight to Holy Spirit, Jesus, and a Father much like my own, who sometimes feels emotionally distant in spite of texting me this a couple hours ago (I’m transitioning to tech during a tech layoff. Should I settle or stick to my guns!?):
I can’t help it, really. Jesus speaking with the Samaritan woman is my rockstar. God the Father’s banner over me is love. And Holy Spirit is constantly hovering over the surface of [my] waters.
For this reason, I expected to love Taylor’s book (she's a lot like me in stepping past boundaries yet admitting to a mother tongue of the heart). Sadly, my expectations met with disappointment.
If this book had strictly consisted of a survey of five world religions, it would have rocked. Most “re-interpretations” of scripture the author provides rock me to my core.
But this author chose to interweave memoir without becoming sufficiently vulnerable to make that fly. I couldn’t connect to her on an emotional level because she never let me. I didn’t even know she was married until the last few chapters!
If she’d been a professor, I’d have loved her for it. But she tried to be both professor and more, significantly failing at the latter.
There are nuggets worth mining in this offering, but I left hungry for something more authentically human in delivery.
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Charity
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March 15, 2019
If you want to have some aspects of Christian elitism challenged, read this book.
If you want to face up to the fact that we are not always right, read this book.
If you want to find more understanding for other religions, read this book.
If you want examples from Barbara's Religion 101 class, read this book.
If you want to take an interest in other religions, read this book.
But I expected to learn more than I did.
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J.L. Neyhart
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August 29, 2019
I really love this book.
Here are some of my favorite quotes:
“Ask anyone what she means when she says 'God' and chances are that you will learn a lot more about that person than you will learn about God.”
"Love God in the person standing right in front of you, the Jesus of my understanding says, or forget the whole thing, because if you cannot do that, then you are just going to keep making shit up."
“Religions are treasure chests of stories, songs, rituals, and ways of life that have been handed down for millennia - not covered in dust but evolving all the way- so that each new generation has something to choose from when it is time to ask the big questions in life. Where did we come from? Why do bad things happen to good people? Who is my neighbor? Where do we go from here? No one should have to start from scratch with questions like these. Overhearing the answers of the world's great religions can help anyone improve his or her own answers. Without a religion, these questions often do not get asked.”
"Existential dizziness is one of the side effects of higher education, and it affects teachers too.”
"The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor. That self-canceling feature of my religion is one of the things I like best about it. Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.”
“I asked God for religious certainty, and God gave me relationships instead. I asked for solid ground, and God gave me human beings instead—strange, funny, compelling, complicated human beings—who keep puncturing my stereotypes, challenging my ideas, and upsetting my ideas about God, so that they are always under construction.”
“The problem with every sacred text is that it has human readers. Consciously or unconsciously, we interpret it to meet our own needs. There is nothing wrong with this unless we deny that we are doing it, as when someone tells me that he is not 'interpreting' anything but simply reporting what is right there on the page. This is worrisome, not only because he is reading a translation from the original Hebrew or Greek that has already involved a great deal of interpretation, but also because it is such a short distance between believing you possess an error-free message from God and believing that you are an error-free messenger of God. The literalists I like least are the ones who do not own a Bible. The literalists I like most are the ones who admit that they do not understand every word God has revealed in the Bible, though they still believe God has revealed it. I can respect that.
I can respect almost anyone who admits to being human while reading a divine text. After that, we can talk - about we highlight some teachings and ignore others, about how we decide which ones are historically conditioned and which ones are universally true, about who has influenced our reading of scripture and how our social location affects what we hear. The minute I believe I know the mind of God is the minute someone needs to tell me to sit down and tell me to breathe into a paper bag.”
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Rebecca
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February 28, 2019
(3.5) After she left the pastorate, Taylor taught Religion 101 at Piedmont College, a small Georgia institution, for 20 years. This book arose from what she learned about other religions – and about her own, Christianity – by engaging with faith in an academic setting and taking her students on field trips to mosques, temples, and so on. The title phrase comes from a biblical scholar named Krister Stendahl who served as the Lutheran bishop of Stockholm. At a press conference prior to the dedication of a controversial Mormon temple, he gave a few rules for interfaith dialogue: “1. When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies. 2. Don’t compare your best to their worst. 3. Leave room for holy envy.”
Taylor emphasizes that appreciating other religions is not about flattening their uniqueness or looking for some lowest common denominator. Neither is it about picking out the aspects that affirm your own tradition and ignoring the rest. Of course, the divisions within Christianity are just as noticeable as the barriers between faiths. This book counsels becoming comfortable with not being right, or even knowing who is right. A lot of Evangelicals will squirm at this relativist perspective, but this book is just what they need. Releases March 12th.
Some favorite lines:
“To walk the way of sacred unknowing is to remember that our best ways of thinking and speaking about God are provisional.”
“Once you have given up on knowing who is right, it is easy to see neighbors everywhere you look. … when my religion gets in the way of loving my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor.”
“I asked God for religious certainty, and God gave me relationships instead. I asked for solid ground, and God gave me human beings instead—strange, funny, compelling, complicated human beings—who keep puncturing my stereotypes, challenging my ideas, and upsetting my ideas about God, so that they are always under construction.”
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Melora
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June 6, 2019
I haven't been "wow-ed" by all Barbara Brown Taylor's books -- some of them have seemed a bit fluffy -- but this is a good one. While I don't agree with everything she says, I do agree with her mostly, and she makes me think about why I believe as I do, which is always a good thing.
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Ivonne Rovira
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June 3, 2020
“Holy envy” is what author and Episcopal priest Barbara Taylor Brown calls the appreciation of the best of religions other than one’s own. While so many fear that learning about other major religions might shake one’s religious commitment, Taylor Brown found that it made her realize the commonalities among the world’s great faiths and caused her to appreciate all adherents. A wonderful read.
Special thanks to Lucy Waterbury for introducing me to a fabulous Sunday School and this book.
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Donna Craig
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February 14, 2021
Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest, a World Religions professor, and an accomplished author. This is the first book of hers that I have read. I read and discussed it with my husband.
Holy Envy, as Dr Taylor explains, is seeing the practices of other religions and wishing you had them in your own. Roughly. She shares her journey as a professor, and how it led to the opening of her mind and heart to the practices of other faiths. She describes many odd little moments when she would see God, or Jesus, in the practices of their faiths. I loved her descriptions of those moments. And her prescription for being a neighbor.
This book is sometimes profound and sometimes angering, but it is never boring. I get the feeling she doesn’t mind if I disagree. And I loved the ending.
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Krista
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January 23, 2021
I found this book to be incredibly enlightening. I don't agree with everything the author writes, but I find her goal honorable because for the most part her entire narrative is based around this precept: "to find the bridge between my faith and the faith of other people so that those of us who draw water from wells on different sides of the river can still get together from time to time making the whole area safer for our children." (part 1 of 8, 47 minutes) As a teacher and librarian in a middle school that includes students from 47 different countries, I value this global perspective as I look on these children through the filter of their culture, trying to bridge any gap they may have that would impede their education. Any help I can get to see better into their world is welcome. My favorite quote comes near the end: "The unity of the Creator is expressed in the diversity of the creation." (part 7 of 8, 32 minutes). What a beautiful philosophy and one to which I personally prescribe: UNITY!! And the beauty of diversity. To anyone who wants to grow spiritually, I heartily recommend this book.
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Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others
Reviewed by Diane Reynolds
November 1, 2019
By Barbara Brown Taylor. HarperOne, 2019. 256 pages. $25.99/hardcover; $15.99/paperback; $12.99/eBook.
Buy from QuakerBooks
Barbara Brown Taylor’s Holy Envy is reminiscent of Marcus J. Borg’s Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time as a story of circling back in a richer way to a faith of origin. In her fine book, Taylor describes embracing more fully her own Christianity—albeit a gentler version—through her exploration of the other major world religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam.
Taylor explains her move from Episcopal pastor to religion professor at Piedmont College in Georgia, where for 20 years she taught comparative religion. Encounters with other religions led her to what she calls “holy envy” (a term borrowed from biblical scholar Krister Stendahl). This is a longing to possess the practices or beliefs from other faiths. If only, for example, Taylor says, Christianity encompassed Hinduism’s many paths to God, Judaism’s Sabbath day of rest, and Buddhism’s concept of impermanence. Yet for all her yearning toward aspects of other faiths—and sometimes distress with her own—she ends up discovering that she is “Christian to the core.” Interfaith study didn’t send her hurtling toward another religion or into universalism but instead sharpened her vision and her respect for limits: “What I see in the neighbor’s yard does not belong to me, but it shows me things in my own yard that I might otherwise have overlooked.”
It also, paradoxically, softened, though not eradicated, her boundaries: Holy Envy is in part a friendly guide to interfaith dialogue. Leaning into her own experiences, Taylor notes the ways she has sometimes unconsciously offended other faiths—until this was gently explained to her by an adherent. Again citing Stendahl, she offers three rules of religious understanding: (1) “When trying to understand another religion, you should ask the adherents of that religion and not its enemies.” (2) “Don’t compare your best to their worst.” (3) “Leave room for holy envy.”
Quakers have much they can learn from Taylor. I remember some years ago Quakers inadvertently offending Native Americans by using sweat lodges out of context—and the debate that erupted over the boundaries on appropriations from other faiths. That which we desire, we might not have a right to take. None of this is easy, and none of us, no matter how pure we try to be, can anticipate our every blind spot. She offers good reminders too that it is easy to hate: for some Christians to equate all nontheists with the worst excesses of Stalinism—or Satanism—while it is equally easy for some nonbelievers to angrily reduce all Christians to the worst kind of fundamentalists. The more respect we can have for those who differ—especially those others who represent the “shadows” in ourselves we might not want to acknowledge—the better off we will be. As Taylor emphasizes, the diversity even within faiths is profound. We need above all, she reminds us, not to talk but to listen.
On a more personal note, Taylor’s book is autobiographical—about her experiences teaching and of growth in faith. As one who has taught comparative religion myself (and even, like her, used Huston Smith as a text, despite his essentialism), I was fascinated by the differences in privilege. Taylor taught at a small residential college, whereas I taught at commuter schools or a community college: no field trips 70 miles away for my busy students, despite Taylor’s belief in such trips’ centrality. This points to the importance of Taylor’s granular approach: the more details we learn about other lives, the more likely we are to be startled by seeming innocuous differences, to ask questions, and to come to a wider understanding.
This is a book worth reading, for, in Taylor’s words, as we expand our love toward other faiths, our own “box will turn out to be too small,” at which point we will build one with “more windows in it.”
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Barbara Brown Taylor
A Review of Barbara Brown Taylor’s “Holy Envy”
Religion 101
Zachary Houle
Zachary Houle
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Jan 2, 2020
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“Holy Envy” Book Cover
“Holy Envy” Book Cover
Barbara Brown Taylor is one of my favourite theological writers simply because she’s so plain and honest with her words. Whether she’s struggling with faith as she does in Leaving Church to struggling with the darkness in Learning to Walk in the Dark, I’ve found something of the profound in her works. Well, Holy Envy is a bit of a different book — it’s lighter in tone for one thing — as it is a memoir of the time she spent teaching a first-year undergraduate course at university on world religions. As she notes in the book, trying to teach five or six major world religions in the span of 15 weeks is a huge undertaking, so much so that she didn’t teach the same class twice. Still, she did the best she could and this book is a look back at how her teaching and endless field trips to places of faith in religions other than Christianity changed her and her students.
The first half of this book is a rear-view mirror into the places she visited in and around the Atlanta area where she lives, and the second half of the book is more focused on how her “holy envy” — or picking and choosing desirable parts of other faith traditions and claiming them for herself as one — deepened her Christian faith. Of course, there are dangers in doing this (which Brown Taylor recounts at length) but the ultimate moral of the book is that teaching the course and her own discovery of other religions such as Hinduism, Islam and Judaism ignited her own spirituality in lively ways. Even at a tick more than 200 pages, this is a dense book. You may have to read it twice to really pick up on the things that Brown Taylor has to say, which makes it utterly recommendable and indispensable.
If you were to push me, I’d say that the chapters that Brown Taylor and her students play tourists on the field trips they go on held the most fascination for me. I’m lucky to belong to a church that borrows from other faith traditions in its services, but it feels somewhat perfunctory and we don’t go into something as, say, Celtic Christianity with any sort of depth — it’s more an acknowledgment that we have other ancestors in the faith, and a way to bring other traditions from other peoples of the world, such as indigenous peoples, into the church service. That’s why I found these field trips so inspiring. You got to actually experience what people do in mosques for example. That view, being written by someone of the Christian faith (an outsider looking in), was fascinating to me. How the students sometimes reacted was another pleasant surprise to me as I may have reacted in similar ways if I were there in flesh and blood.
The big takeaway from this book, to me, is to love your neighbour — whether they are of the same flavour of Christianity as you, a different flavour, or a completely different religion altogether. This is a posture that I must sometimes remember and work on. If I may indulge you in a story of my own, let me tell you about something that happened to me just before Christmas. As I was coming home from work and crossing a street, a car that was turning was seeming about to barrel right over me! I put out my hand in the universal gesture for stop. However, the owner of the car — a man — had his window slightly open and told me, “Gee, could you walk a bit faster, bud?” To which I responded something along the lines of the right of way pedestrians had. As he drove away, now behind me, I heard him mutter, “Blah blah blah.” So I turned on the spot and started cursing him really loudly.
To say that I’m embarrassed by this behaviour — especially now after reading this book — is an understatement. I wonder if there was another way I could have gotten my view that I was afraid of being run over in a more amicable and friendly manner, one that didn’t feel as I though I had to run after the car and do harm to it or its owner, something I stewed on for hours after this incident. This book taught me that I have a lot of work to do in my capacity as a loving person. (Maybe the problem is I don’t love myself enough, but that’s the subject of a different article or essay.) What’s more, and switching gears a bit, I think I’m going to keep my eyes open and see if I can apply a form of holy envy to my life. What can I learn from others who don’t have the same faith background as me? I’ve always said that there are many ways to God (which gets me in trouble with evangelical Christians who claim that only Jesus is the way to the Father), so perhaps there’s some exploration in order of other ways that are not necessarily connected to the Christian faith at all.
In any event, this is — by Brown Taylor’s usual standards — a finely written book. It is full of warm and humour, but deep, reflective thought as well. There’s certainly a lot of bone to chew on here, especially about how other Christians should view other faith traditions. You don’t have to give up your Christianity to find and respect something about another culture’s way of doing things, as Brown Taylor points out. It may augment your own way of believing in Christ. Brown Taylor has a “whatever works for you” approach (so long as it doesn’t harm yourself or other people), and this is something I fervently believe in when it comes to how I deal with Christ. So my advice would be to read this book, see if Brown Taylor speaks to you in any way, and become a student of the world in this wide-ranging and ever-so-engrossing treat of a book. You may surprise yourself. I know I did, just by reading this.
Barbara Brown Taylor’s Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others was published by HarperOne on March 12, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
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