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(More customer reviews)As the reviewer above, this book was assigned in a theology course I took in college just after the second printing. The essence of the teaching of "story" stuck with me but I had forgotten the name of the book...luckily, I still have my college notes (writers never throw anything away--it might be useful someday) and have been searching for the book online as I must have been the one semester I sold all my books back to buy flowers for my mother for Mother's Day. If I find it in a box somewhere...so much the better. I'll have two copies.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove: An Invitation to Religious Studies (Revised Edition)
The essence of Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Doveremains intact: its vision of religious studies as sustainedreflection on our lifelong voyage to discover who we are.The story we choose for ourselves, the story we live, cansacralie or secularie our lives and our world by the wayin which we choose to relate to it. With this awareness ofthe story dimension of life, Ascent of the Mountain, Flightof the Dove opens us to awe, reverence, and wonder at therisks and possibilities of human freedom.This book is even more important than it was thirtyyears ago. We need religion to strike deeply into the self,away from public glare. Unless Americans become moresophisticated about the language of the self, inner life willshrivel. In addition, our people will continue to be vulnerableto fundamentalist movements. Such movements takeover too many innocents. They promise, and sometimesdeliver, a touching happiness. But they do so by closingthe spirit in a powerful and dangerous way.Families and schools do not provide a large and criticalvocabulary by which to express the inner longings ofthe spirit. The souls of many are parched and they gladlyaccept water, any water, from those who offer it. Theliberation of the religious spirit from trivial, closed,and simplistic systems of thought can only be achievedthrough the development of a critical language, exercises,and disciplines that open rather than close the mind, thatlead to higher viewpoints, breakthroughs, and new syntheses,in a constant enlargement of spirit. Novaks bookleads us to that place.
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