The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary
4 | 6 ratings
Price: 17.05
Last update: 03-14-2026
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- Carolyn J.Order our of ChaosFrom her first words, Terry Tempest Williams is a calm island in a chaotic world.
- SadieDisappointing, privilegedIt’s a great premise with poor execution. There are so many ways this idea could have been inspiring. This is not one of them.
- Books Can Save a LifeDisappointingI always welcome writing by Terry Tempest Williams. This one is a bit of a slog, though. Seems as though it needs a more substantial theme to tie the essays together. Written like a journal or memoir, it partly takes place during the pandemic. Given what has transpired since, the state of our environment and future outlook has gotten much worse, and there are few optimistic threads here to hang on to. Not that I need optimism, but there is a bleakness here that I struggled with, and no solid premise for the book. The Glorians theme seemed slight. Further, I don’t have an interest in Harvard Divinity School, where she teaches and is writer in residence. One essay was about a series of presentations for a climate/environmental related event at Harvard, reported in a rather flat way. Second-hand accounts of who presented and what they said did not at all hold my interest. Seems as though she had the book contract and that publishers tend to publish whatever their big name authors write. I would suggest readers try some of her earlier, well known books.
- Steve PaulOn Healing and Heart: Terry Tempest Williams's Way to WisdomIn the spring of 2019, Harvard University put an end to a campus controversy by sending in a demolition crew to remove a 200-year-old red oak tree from a courtyard outside the Divinity School. The Divinity Tree had attracted a legion of impassioned friends, worshippers, and adherents of the idea that trees are sentient or at least natural beings deserving of respect, empathy, and spiritual devotion. Harvard had lied about the tree’s health. It had no interest in somehow incorporating the tree into its plan to build a convocation center for the Divinity School. But the tree itself was already a convocation center for the school, went one of the opposing arguments, a towering symbol of interfaith study and community.
The drawn-out Harvard debate provides a fulcrum for Terry Tempest Williams in her typically endearing and heart-driven new book, The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary. It’s a fragmentary or episodic combination of memoir, diary, and natural world philosophy, a strategy that has defined so many of her books over the last four decades.
Williams, one of our most elegant champions of natural wildness and wisdom, has been serving as writer in residence at the Divinity School and her devotion to her students by way of such seminars as “Finding Beauty in a Broken World,” is palpable. She launches The Glorians amid the fear and uncertainty of the Covid pandemic and proceeds through the post-shutdown years of anxiety, loss, and revelation.
What are the “Glorians”? The idea came to her in a dream; with its hint of religiosity, the coinage, to her, takes on the recognition of the “Holy Ordinary,” the spiritual essence that can be found in ants at work or deep in the stardusted cosmos.
Mourning the loss of the Divinity Tree parallels another difficult loss, the recent suicide of her brother. The aching family story can’t help but remind many loyal readers of Williams’s landmark memoir, Refuge, which threaded her mother’s cancer story around the environmental crisis enveloping Utah’s Great Salt Lake and a beloved bird refuge.
In this heart-rending and truth-bearing book, Williams exposes her own fragility as well as her strength in encountering our broken world and striving to heal it. - Phil GDelightful book, just what we need.The book is a marvelous meditation on modern life, much of it during Covid 19 years, broadened to all of society today. Ms. Williams is spiritual, thoughtful and loving all at once. She is a great writer, and also a great speaker with a soothing voice; I listened to the audiobook. Perhaps a better choice than the print one. Take it with you in the car, if you must. Better yet, take it with you out in the wild. Maybe even better, go out in the wild without it and listen when you get back home.
The story about the Divinity Tree pits Christians, Buddhists and Pagans against Harvard. Spoiler, Harvard wins. Cutting down an old maple tree to make room for an environmentally friendly building doesn’t sit right with me either. Maybe the best essay is the one about geology. She says “Rocks and humans are not so different; we are also acted on by time.” and “In my next life I want to return as a geologist, to perceive the world that once was, and therefore imagine what the world could become.” Very nice.
Undoubtedly a five star book, but also not perfect. It would be better without the politics, especially when it is sometimes factually dubious - Covid came from a wet market, some of the assertions about BLM protests, anti-union complaints in France.
And a pet peeve of mine, I really don’t care anymore to hear people flying all over the world tell me about climate change.
All that said, great book. Read it, listen to it, feel it. - KateSuperb story telling!This is another superb collection of essays. I love Williams’ lyrical way of expressing herself as she offers a glimpse of her world through her eyes and heart. Writing about nature, work, family, environmental concerns, and spirituality, Williams tells stories of brokenness, then circles back to how they become stories of healing. Thanks to NetGalley & Grove/Atlantic, Inc. for the eGally. my objective review. I’ve loved all her previous books and was excited when I saw on NetGalley she had this new title coming out.