Margaret Bendroth is director of the Congregational Library in Boston, Massachusetts, and a historian of American religions. In this elegantly written book, she makes a good case for remembering as "an act with spiritual meaning, pushing us against the unknown." Cultivating the past is not an easy thing given the cultural propensity to focus on the latest fad or phenomenon.
In a chapter titled "Stranded in the Present," Bendroth comments on how forgetting has become part of modern life; buildings come and go and most of us know very little about history of the places where we live and work. Immersed in a sea of ads and data about moving forward and making progress, we regard the past as a foreign country that no one wants to visit anymore. Despite the variety of available gateways to the past, many younger people only focus on creating their own personal archives of experiences and memories with social media posts, scrapbooks, and digital photo files.
In the closing essays in The Spiritual Practice of Remembering, Bendroth challenges Christians to begin a new conversation about religious tradition and to revivify connections with the communion of saints who are spread across time and space. Here memory becomes not just an isolated act of an individual but a cooperative adventure uniting believers as they try to make sense of the past, present, and future.
