Last Saturday was the Spirituality Book Festival at Seattle University, and books intern J.T. Oldfield, who also blogs at Bibliofreak, checked it out. (I agree with Oldfield below: I'm a hard-core atheist, but Kathleen Norris is the shit. Try her book The Cloister Walk if you're interested in The Bible as literature.) Here's J.T. Oldfield's report:

Going to the Spirituality Book Festival on Saturday was probably the nerdiest thing I’ve done all year. Not because books about religion are inherently nerdy (they are), but because I felt so very young there. I was a good generation younger than 90% of the people there.

I went later in the day, and caught a reading of the new anthology, Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of IMAGE, edited by IMAGE Quarterly founder and editor Gregory Wolfe. While the reading gave me a nice cross-section of the day’s events, and I wanted to support IMAGE, the price of the book ($30) was too much.

The keynote speaker, Kathleen Norris, was really who I was there to see. And while I sat in the crowd feeling young and being asked repeatedly if I was in school there (no), Norris’s lecture, including a reading from her newest book Acedia & Me, as well as her other books and volumes of poetry, put me at ease, made me laugh, and made me think.

In Acedia & Me, Norris talks about the unexpected angels we meet—"angels" in the sense that they say the right thing at the right time, or that say the thing we really need to hear. The example that Norris gave from her own life happened in the late ‘60’s in New York. After meeting some drag queens at a book launch, she went with them to a deconsecrated church turned gay juice bar called Sanctuary in Hell’s Kitchen. Deep in conversation, one drag queen asked Norris, “what are you doing here?” She didn’t ask it cruelly, Norris said. She didn’t mean "what are you doing here in this gay juice bar in Hell’s Kitchen with a bunch of queens?" She meant, "What are you doing here in New York, in your life?" It was a conversation that Norris never forgot.

“Faith is an experience; it’s not something we give intellectual ascent [to],” Norris said. Sometimes it just takes a drag queen acting as an angel to jolt you out of a funk. For me, it was a matter of getting off my ass on a rainy afternoon and feeling like a total nerd.

Kathleen Norris will be back at Elliott Bay Book Company early next month in support of the paperback version of Acedia & Me.