Dakota A Spiritual Geography Summary

Place is the centerpiece of Kathleen Norris’ memoir, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. This textual map is an eloquent gathering of herself as she explores her inheritance and her faith in a small town in western South Dakota. The land she captures on the pages of this aptly named ‘geography’ lives, breathes, transforms. But Dakota is not for the romantic seeking a nostalgic reconnection with the earth. It is a land of fierce winds and oppressive skies, drought and dust, killing rains. It is a land that does not forgive “easy optimism,” a land in which “anything that is shallow—the false hope that denies geography, climate, history—will dry up and blow away.”
Norris slowly embraces how this land transforms her, learning to parallel the asceticism of the nearby Benedictine monks with the barrenness of the desert plains she now calls home. She names this her sea change, calling to the geographic history that once drowned these plains in oceanic then glacial waters. “The atmosphere of the sea persists in Perkins County,” one writer notes in a Dakota newsletter, and like the vastness of the high sea, this land can produce both monastic reflection and
I have pondered this word since a Sunday school back in spring in which a fellow church member raised the notion of “radical hospitality” as a tool for social justice. I had no idea what this concept meant. Truthfully, in my mind, the word “hospitality” conjures hellscapes of half heard, half-finished conversations and multi-course meals on layered platters, all served at a table seating too many people to name. My notion of hospitality had narrowed to a performance that was both intimidating and exhausting. This is not to say I don’t enjoy partaking in the celebrations that others host; I’ll even clean, but to muster the energy to organize and see these events through is, for me, a joyless task. Such was my definition of