"Have you ever read CENTERING?" a friend asked me. "That book changed my life," she explained, with a knowing smile, "and I'll even loan you my copy." M. C. Richards was a potter, teacher, and poet, and her 1962 book is "a story of transformation" (p. 4). In his Foreward to the 25th Anniversay Edition of M.C.'s "truly subversive book" (p. ix), Matthew Fox writes, "I consider this book one of the great works of American philosophy: it is so cosmological, so feminist (without once using that term), so original, so full of wisdom, so post Cartesian, so nondualistic, so moral, and so fully a part of the mystical tradition of the West that one wonders from what source it arrived in our world . . . This is a prophetic and mystical book. Such books are dangerous. They are the kind dictators burn, churches tend to ignore, and consumer cultures leave on the shelf. For they have the power to awaken, to stir, to disturb, and to transform" (pp. vii-viii).

After forty years, CENTERING remains as relevant as ever. The good news is that it's still in print. M. C. observes that, in our society, "ordinary education and social training seem to impoverish the capacity for free initiative and artistic imagination. We talk indepedence, but we enact conformity . . . Brains are washed (when they are not clogged), wills are standardized, that is to say immobilized. Someone within cries for help. There must be more to life than all these learned acts, all this highly conditioned consumption. A person wants to do something of his own, to feel his own being alive and unique. He wants out of bondage. He wants in to the promised land" (p. 43).

Wisdom arrives through a childlike sense of wonder, or through "centering," as M. C. calls it. "Within us lives a merciful being," she observes, "who helps us to our feet however many times we fall" (p. 8). "Wisdom is not the product of mental effort," she tells us. Rather, it is a state of "total being, in which capacities for knowledge and for love, for survival and for death, for imagination, inspiration, intuition, for all the fabulous functioning of this human being who we are, come into a center with their forces, come into an experience of meaning that can voice itself as wise action" (p. 15). She encourages us to "ride our lives like natural beasts, like tempests, like the bounce of a ball or the slightest ambiguous hovering of ash, the drift of scent: let us stick to those currents that can carry us, membering them with our souls. Our world personifies us, we know ourselves by it" (p. 7). "I sense this," she writes; "we must be steady enough in ourselves, to be open and to let the winds of life blow through us, to be our breath, our inspiration; to breathe with them, mobile and soft in the limberness of our bodies, in our agility, our ability, as it were, to dance, and yet to stand upright, to be intact, to be persons" (p. 12). CENTERING is a "sensual, sexual, trusting" book "full of surprises" (p. xv) you'll want to share with your friends.

G. Merritt

I've read this several times since it was first published in the 60's MC Richards has a lot of insight and some very good things to say to teachers.

This book is a classic! I came across it in the '70's and now, again, when I am old enough to understand the depth of Mary Caroline Richard's wisdom. She truly knows what life-generating relationships are about. The best news about this book is that it is still in print.

This spiritual and, in many ways, autobiographical work is an eye-opening, heart-awakening, mind-expanding, and imagination-bending achievement.

Some we value for their thinking, others for what they make. But M. C. Richards is that rare one among us who shows us a way by fact of her very presence. All else follows.

My copy of this book is underlined, notated and thumbed. Mary Richards writes in the voice of a poet, often dreamily, of the gentle art of education Rudolf Steiner style. I've put Steiner theories to work successfully--but not in a dogmatic way--in a home-school setting, with small mixed-age groups of home schoolers. If we could summarize the book in a few words, we might say this: children learn through their bodies and minds and hearts what they cannot conceive of through their brains. Clearly, the brilliant M.C. Richards is an intellectual, yet Steiner education is distinctly down to earth (one could call it biodynamics of the mind) and concrete. Highly recommend for anyone interested in the way children learn. Also the reader benefits from Richards' vast experience living in Steiner communities. Includes history of this astonishing movement. Amazing that such a way of life exists in the nineties in America!

Berry may be the only "geologian" - Earth scholar. As an 11 year old he had an epiphanal experience in a meadow that gave him a new sense of reality. Later as a priest of the Passionist order, he took the name Thomas after Thomas Aquinas, and is influenced by Aquinas' rediscovery of the universe and quotes from Summa Theologica. The first two essays introduce his cosmology under the broad topics "Economics" and "The earth: a new context for religious unity".

The remaining seven essays present a critique of Berry. Almost all are appreciative of Berry's view point even if differing. There are different perspectives offered on how strongly the Bible and the Redemption story should fit in to this evolving earth story. Physicist Brian Swimme offers a scientific perspective, of "science as a partner", on both the role of science in providing the story but also on the role of Berry in teaching to science. Additionally Berry is critiqued from a feminist standpoint. The book concludes with Berry's 12 principles for understanding the universe.

This book offers an introduction to Berry, and through the critiques and "Questions for discussion" after each chapter provides a useful whetstone for thinking about his new cosmology.