Which Canonical Work is Frequently and Frustratingly Misread?

This week for my religion in the news article, I wanted to focus on an aspect of religion I have not been paying all that much attention to, spirituality. While looking through my New York Times phone app to find some articles that stood out to me, I discovered one by Rivka Galchen and Benjamin Moser called Which Canonical Work is Frequently and Frustratingly Misread? Though I didn’t did not expect to use this particular article for my religion in the news post since it had no clear religious connotation within the title, I soon realized I was wrong and changed my mind once I started reading.

The article is split into two sections, one written by each author, I’ll be focusing on the section by Galchen, which was about Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. I remember reading this book in my high school Spanish class and having a whole unit on Don Quixote de la Mancha, analyzing Cervantes’s book and theorizing about its contents. The article really had no outward tie with religion, but it did with spirituality. Galchen received this book her freshman year in college two weeks before her dad unexpectedly passed away, and this book held such a significant meaning in her mind because of that reason, “[i]t wasn’t only because it was the last that I had heard from him that the gift felt coded and meaningful”. This really reminded me of the kind of thing Ammerman was looking for in her book Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes, she wanted to see where religion or spirituality took place in one’s everyday life, and to me, this seemed like a prime example.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/books/review/which-canonical-work-is-frequently-and-frustratingly-misread.html?_r=0