Over the centuries Jews have made and consolidated an important discovery: the book is a means of growth for a healthy mind and an exercised imagination. Reading and writing assist the community in maintaining traditions, resisting absorption, articulating identity and carrying on conversations. With its own distinctive conversational style, at once playful and prayerful, Lightness and Soul explores eight Jewish writers — Alberto Manguel, Robert Lax, John Berger, Simone Weil, Muriel Rukeyser, Leonard Cohen, Harold Bloom and Susan Sontag — who carry on the tradition of honouring and critiquing the worded world. Whatever their many differences in style and substance, the eight readers, writers and thinkers all touch on important matters of the human soul.

J.S. Porter's profile page

Poet and essayist, J.S. Porter was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and educated at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He has had a longtime interest in the arts. Formerly an arts contributor to Grail, in 1999 he received a Catholic Press award for his article on the German-Canadian sculptor Ted Rettig. He is the author of four books: The Thomas Merton Poems; Spirit Book Word: An Inquiry into Spirituality and Literature; Thomas Merton: Hermit at the Heart of Things; and The Glass Art of Sarah Hall.