Details

Subject(s)

• Kohout, Heather Catto, 1959-2014—Philosophy [Browse]
• Human ecology—Texas—Texas Hill Country—Philosophy [Browse]
• Human ecology—Religious aspects—Christianity [Browse]
• Human ecology—Texas—Texas Hill Country—Poetry [Browse]
• Environmental ethics [Browse]
• Ecotheology [Browse]

Editor

• Kohout, Martin Donell, 1959- [Browse]

Writer of introduction

• Kohout, Martin Donell, 1959- [Browse]

Writer of foreword

• Jones, Nancy Baker [Browse]

Library of Congress genre(s)

• Essays [Browse]
• Poetry [Browse]

Series

• Women in Texas history series [More in this series]
• Women in Texas history

Summary note

"The Shimmering Is All There Is: On Nature, God, Science, and More is a collection of essays and poems by the late Heather Catto Kohout. A native of San Antonio, Heather was a disciplined and original thinker and writer. Her education, experience, and temperament-as a loving wife, mother, and daughter; a proud Texan; a teacher and scholar with graduate degrees in English literature and religion; and the founder of a residency program for environmental writers and artists at a ranch in the Texas Hill Country-permeate every word she wrote. She had a unique combination of empathetic imagination, profound spirituality, cosmic sensibility, and an ability to laugh-gently-at her fellow creatures and, especially, herself. Heather Kohout's essays and poems are thoughtful, profound, and generous, shifting constantly between the specific and the universal and carrying throughout a message of stewardship. She was an environmentalist at heart, but her writing explores so much more: nature, art, theology, science, food, and family. She wrote about Mexican teenagers who dress as angels in an attempt to halt drug-related violence; the perils of industrial agriculture; the pleasure of letting the chickens out of their coop in the morning; and the battle to save the Georgetown salamander. Always, she wrote about what it means to try to live an ethical life and to be fully human as a part of, not in opposition to, nature. These essays and poems exemplify the best of Texas womanhood: stubborn independence, fierce conviction, good humor, and instinctive generosity and kindness"-- Provided by publisher.

Notes

Includes index.

Contents

• Foreword / Nancy Baker Jones
• Introduction / Martin Donell Kohout
• Essays / Heather Catto Kohout: The Wonder and Power of Water
• Dreaming Time
• A Mother's Legacy
• Growing Hope
• "Everywhere There's Lots of Piggies ..."
• Carnivorocity
• James Cameron, Alexis de Tocqueville, and the Nature of Nature
• Massachusetts, Part I: Of Books and Houses and Hospitality
• Massachusetts, Part II: Take a Walk on the Wild Side
• Mapping the Geography of Hope: Our Place in the Wilderness
• Sorry, Dad: Wilderness and Government Regulation
• Purity, Ambiguity, and the Investment Portfolio
• The Devil's Bargain: On Gardening and Violence
• Still More on Violence: There Will Be Blood
• Home with the Armadillo: A Love Letter to Texas
• The Gift Economy
• Made for You and Me: Some Thoughts on Private Property
• Double Vision: Prophets, Tribalism, Eugenics, and the Environment
• Cleaning Out the Mental Refrigerator: Niebuhr, McKibben, and Band-Aids
• "A Cup of Tea, a Warm Bath, and a Brisk Walk"
• Stubbing the Giant's Toe: Thoughts on Midwestern Agribusiness
• Hall of Mirrors: The Lost Art of Conversation
• Of Mothers and Mountains
• Barbers, Bison Meat, and the Invisible Hand
• "Sit. Stay. Stay! I Said STAY, Dammit!"
• Faith, Bureaucracy, and Sheep: Thoughts on Changing One's Mind
• Hosts, Guests, and Strangers: Thoughts on Hospitality
• Singing in the Dark
• The Rising Light
• Shooting Holes in the Constitution: Some Thoughts on Guns and Violence
• Meat and Flourishment: Carnivorocity, Take Two
• A Field That Don't Yield: Writer's Block and the Language of Community
• Lenten Reflections: Dead Trees, Bafflement, and Submission
• Tragic Waste: Some Thoughts on the S-Word
• Dorothea Brooke, Betty Friedan, and Big Ag
• The Power of Poetry: Peace, Demons, Sonnets, and Resurrection
• Learning to Listen, and Love
• Gratuitous Beauty
• Signs of the Times: Billboards, Property Rights, and the Enlightenment
• Field Notes from Madron̳o Ranch: Bison and Birds
• Silos: My Beef with Freeman Dyson
• Food Science: Mark Bittman, Michael Pollan, and the Old Testament
• Children of Dawn: Sin in the Twenty-First Century
• A Furry Flurry of Fully Furrowed Brows: My Beef with Freeman Dyson, Part II
• Re-Wilding the Monocultural Self
• Edsels and the Enlightenment: The Downside of Corporate Personhood
• Field Notes from Inside My Head: Connecting Art and Commerce
• Angels in the Dark
• A Father's Legacy
• Submission Guidelines
• Take Me to the River
• Bonfires in the Soul
• Spring Creed
• Microbiomes and Individual Identity: Alexander Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury
• Jellyfish and Revelation
• The Cliff of the Unknown: Desire, Tolerance, and Identity
• Poetry and the Pelvic Bowl
• A Tale of Two Kitties: Thinking About Predators and Cancer
• This and Not That
• The Unsteady Rock: Descartes, Salamanders, and the Nicene Creed
• Mind the Gap: Ghosts, Trees, and Goodbye to a River
• Repairing the World: Beatles, Alaskan Mountain Goats, and Asiatic Cheetahs
• Poems: Invocation
• Prophet
• Compunction
• What She Knew
• Sacrifice
• Proof
• Within
• With
• Ordination
• Ordination: Piedras Negras
• Beside
• Beneath.

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ISBN

• 9781623499501 (hardcover)
• 162349950X (hardcover)

LCCN

2020053642

OCLC

1223072081

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