This could be considered a book about pantheism, as it is labelled. And in a way, it is. She writes of different forms of pantheism throughout history with what appears to be considerable familiarity. Not being an expert on the subject myself, I can't fairly judge.

But for me, it read more as a memoir than a description.

(Aside: I'm not sure how other reviewers were so confused by this fact. The subtitle says "My Life as a Pantheist." If you didn't know going in that it was going to be mostly about her, maybe check your reading comprehension skills, because you were warned.)

Sharman starts off with a basic problem that is probably very common, though not much discussed:

She wants to have a faith. She wants to belong to a religion. She feels that she would be a better, happier, more connected person, and kinder to others, if she did.

But she can't bring herself to believe in gods. Not truly. The concept doesn't make sense to her.

Where she finds meaning in her life is as a naturalist and environmentalist, and so this is where she locates her spiritual meaning as well. Hiking, bird banding, gardening, trying to save the river.

And so what follows is a few hundred pages of (to my mind) well written prose describing this. What is scientific pantheism? Does it really make sense? Does she really believe it? What does that even mean? If she doesn't--or at least, not always--believe, what then? Does it matter? How to find community? How to deal with evil and ugliness and pain?

What I loved about it was that she proposes no answers, not for others and not even for herself. It's a long series of questions, partial answers that change over time, making do, and finding a way of being in the world that gives her life greater meaning and satisfaction despite all of the doubts, unanswered questions and imperfections.

I loved it. Enough to be sad that I have to give it back to the library. Her honesty, self-reflection and searching were all grand. ( )

Standing in the Light by Sharman Apt Russell is a true blend of the writer’s experiences of nature and spiritual growth. Russell described her life as being a Pantheist, a word coined by John Toland in the 1700s. In beautiful prose she captured the joys of nature especially with bird watching and banding. In the text the writer reviewed the tenets of Eastern religions that she learned from books, companions, and during her travels as a younger woman in Asian countries.
Interestingly she put into context the lives and experiences of Pantheists like Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Giordano Bruno, Baruch Spinoza, Henry David Thoreau, D. H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, and founder of the World Pantheist Movement Paul Harrison. Russell explained while being a Pantheist how she continued an on-and-off basis to have ties with Quakers. She wrote glowingly about her husband’s and family’s love for nature, work as a creative writing professor at two universities, philosophy, religious life, living in Silver City, and her friends that were involved in conservation efforts in New Mexico. ( )

A wonderful book, part religious and philosophical history, part biography, part natural history, part spiritual exploration, all woven together in a brilliant tapestry. ( )

Sharman Apt Russell challenges my abstract and lazy pantheism, as I had hoped, with this hard to categorize book. Reading it, I quickly realized how truly ignorant I am about the environment, how much I take for granted. I enjoy my creature comforts too much, am too distracted to ever comprehend Nature the way she does. She can identify the assorted flora and fauna of her native New Mexico with ease and knows rancher neighbors who can quote Cervantes. Contrariwise, I understand that I need to aerate and fertilize my ostentatious lawn on occasion and am lucky if I even know one of my neighbors (although, owing to the housing bust, the distance between occupied homes in my community does give it a very ranch-like feel at times).

Against the backdrop of her amateur ornithology, Russell traces pantheism’s thread through early Greek thought, Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, Tibetan Buddhism, Quakerism, Whitman, Hinduism, Taoism and Gaia Theory. She paints in broad strokes when discussing them, so there are gaps. But the gaps aren’t so large that I much cared, instead appreciating her fluid prose and learned insights. My only criticism is that she sometimes clicks off the common names of wildlife with the strained enthusiasm of reciting a liturgy. To me, it’s like reading a phone book. I guess I'm more generalist in my orientation – which is what I’d suspected all along, anyway. I propose the comfort of sharing in a community of believers is more comforting than the belief itself.

( )

This book is tough for me to review.

On the one hand, it was a revelation, an epiphany, a waking to the fact that godless people have labels we can hang upon the numinous. It gave me impetus to pick up the new Gregory Hays translation of Marcus Aurelius. In Russell's book I found several soft hollow shocks of recognition and affirmation. And yet, the writing was choppy. The use of 'principle' for 'principal' more than once was grating. The strings of sentence fragments. Annoying in the extreme. The way Russell wove the memoir part of the book with the research and exposition of pantheism's history was, to my eye, awkward.

Three stars tempered with ambivalence. I could have gone as high as four for content and as low as two for style. ( )