August Turak is a spiritual adventurer who has lived a highly disciplined life on the edge.

At 19, Turak was obsessed with the purpose of life. Finding the religion of his childhood inadequate and unable to find life’s purpose in normal pursuits, Turak was trapped between his longing for a life worth living and his fear that such a life may not exist.

Then an encounter with a Zen Master, Richard Rose, convinced Turak that the only meaningful life was an authentic spiritual search—one that tackled once and for all the fundamental riddle of life and death. Dropping out of college, Turak spent the next five years as Mr. Rose’s first student, digging ditches and laying carpet to survive while building groups of others interested in Rose’s hard-edged brand of Zen.

From Rose, Turak’s search led him to a spiritual teacher who founded the IBM Executive School, then to the executive suite in New York City, and finally to the deafening silence of a Trappist Monastery. It is at Mepkin Abbey where Turak’s award winning essay Brother John takes place and where the spiritual questions he asked for over thirty years are finally answered.

Throughout his quest, Turak remained an ordinary man riddled with religious doubts and personal inadequacies, yet he sacrificed most things that many hold dear on the off chance that he would unravel life’s mysteries and could share his insights with others.

At first glance, Turak is too confrontational, non-relativistic, and uncompromising for contemporary spirituality, and too open-minded, pluralistic, and inclusive for traditional religion. Yet Turak’s spiritual paradigm has hit a nerve. He presents a non-relativistic yet open-minded approach that combines the best of the traditional religious paradigm with the best of the emergent paradigm, and the response from every quarter of the religious and non-religious spectrum is amazing.

Though progressive, pluralistic, and theologically liberal, Turak also espouses the traditional religious values so often impugned, even denigrated, in the postmodern spirituality of the New Age. Turak is an ascetic. Ascetic is a Greek word for athletic training and, like our athletes, he is fascinating. Yet unlike athletic heroes hankering for glory, Turak anonymously sought the training that would help him solve the riddle of life and death — to find out who he really was.

August Turak’s appeal transcends age, gender, religious affiliation, and the absence of religious affiliation. He attracts the sophisticated seeker and beginner alike while also intriguing agnostics and atheists. Using a narrative, inspirational approach his rattling good stories — replete with romance, strange encounters, and almost supernatural episodes — bring the authentic spiritual search to life.

It is this approach that won his essay the Grand Prize and $100,000 in the John Templeton Foundation’s Power of Purpose Essay Contest, and made Brother John a must-read for religious seekers the world over.