By David J. Leigh
Circuitous trips: glossy religious Autobiography presents a detailed interpreting and research of ten significant existence tales by means of twentieth-century leaders and thinkers from various non secular and cultural traditions: Mohandas Gandhi, Black Elk, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, C. S. Lewis, Malcolm X, Paul Cowan, Rigoberta Menchu, Dan Wakefield, and Nelson Mandela. The publication makes use of techniques from literary feedback, developmental psychology (influenced by means of Erik Erikson, James Fowler, and Carol Gilligan), and spirituality (influenced by way of John S. Donne, Emile Griffin, Walter Conn, and Bernard Lonergan). every one textual content is learn within the gentle of the autobiographical culture all started via St. Augustine's Confessions, yet with a spotlight on distinctively glossy and post-modern ameliorations of the self-writing style. The twentieth-century context of spiritual alienation, social autonomy, identification crises and politics, and the quest for social justice is tested in each one textual content.
Read or Download Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography PDF
Best leaders & notable people books
Abu Nuwas (Makers of the Muslim World)
A readable survey of this celebrated ninth century Arab poet.
An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke
This selection of essays shifts the point of interest of scholarly debate clear of the subjects that experience usually ruled the examine of Edmund Burke. long ago, mostly ideology-based or hugely textual reviews have tended to color Burke as a “prophet” or “precursor” of hobbies as assorted as conservatism, political pragmatism, and romanticism.
A clean biography of Mary Tudor which demanding situations traditional perspectives of her as a weeping hysteric and love-struck romantic, supplying as a substitute the portrait of a queen who drew on resources of authority to extend the facility of her place: epistolary conventions and the rhetoric of chivalry that imbued the French and English courts.
“A journey de strength that underwrites and shifts the petrified photo of Islam disseminated by way of mainstream media. ”—Walter D. Mignolo, writer of The Darker part of Western Modernity “Gives us a wholly assorted photograph of Muslims within the Americas than are available within the tested literature. a fancy glimpse of the wealthy variety and old intensity of Muslim presence within the Caribbean and Latin the United States.
- John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion
- The great agnostic : Robert Ingersoll and American freethought
- Religion and Social Justice
- Locations of Buddhism: Colonialism and Modernity in Sri Lanka (Buddhism and Modernity)
- I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald Reagan to Nancy Reagan
- The King's Speech
Additional info for Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography
Sample text
But we still have much to learn from the structures and patterns of the autobiography itself. THOMAS MERTON 33 twenties. Yet he chose as a title a circular journey form-the spiral seven-storey mountain of the Piivgatorio, which describes the middle portion of Dante’s journey. Ironically, or perhaps prophetically, Merton’s age of twenty-nine when he begins his story in 1944 turns out to be just past the midpoint of his life (1915-68). The twenty-seven years of his pre-monastic life narrated in Tlze Seven Storey Mountain make up the first half of his life story.
Eventheepiloguerenewsthe water imagery by describing Merton’s other self-the writer-as “the old man of the sea” (411). In effect, the directional image of the “captive traveler” expands through its contradictory associations with both cleansing water and the original abyss to include the conflicts of an upward circular movement in his life story. As sailor and hero, he desires both travel and home, seeks cleansing and experiences the abyss in thesameobjects, reaches land whichoftenturns out to be an island, and concludes with these contradictory hungers only THOMAS MERTON 37 tentativelyresolved.
Thus, even though Daytells us she is not going “to leave out all the sins” as shedid in her earlier version of her autobiography, she fails in The L m g Lortelitzess to mention some liaisons, and even an abortion, which her biographer uncovers(Miller ch. 5). Similarly, Merton idealizes his father’s life as a painterand his influence on Merton, a move that leads to a variety of new interpretations of his life (see Mott, Cooper). Ideological influences can lead to rnisreadings of stages of one’s life story, as Malcolm X admits to Haley whilerecounting his Black Muslim period from his later perspective as an orthodox Muslim.