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The Seventh Seal
What I like about Bergman’s The Seventh Seal is its religious realism. The knight, the hero of the story, is tortured by doubt and the beauty of his character lies in is his need to resolve that doubt. Doubt is the springboard of his motivation. What is so often missing among Christians and traditionally religious [...]
Fearless
I was watching a documentary one time on near-death experiences. One such survivor was a woman in her fifties. She was unremarkable, but that only made her more credible as she ecstatically related her experience with the “white light” and how grateful she was to be free from fear forever. But what really struck me [...]
Thomas Merton's Dark Path: The Inner Experience of a Contemplative
While The Denial of Death exposes the fundamental problem of our existence, and The Ego and the Dynamic Ground provides an overview of the spiritual stages of life, William Shannon guides the mature seeker through the apophatic quest for Truth in Thomas Merton’s Dark Path: The Inner Experience of a Contemplative.
Our Town
In Our Town by Thornton Wilder, Act 1 and Act 2 suggests a good old-fashioned love story, taking place in a small town. Then, Act 3 takes us by surprise. Act 3 takes place in the village cemetery where the dead reveal a fascinating spiritual take on the meaning of life. From a content standpoint, [...]
My Stroke of Insight
I like My Stroke of Insight for the same reason I like Awakenings: Like Oliver Sachs, Jill Bolte Taylor explores everyday experience by comparing it to extremes. By detailing her recovery from a severe stroke, we come away with rare insights into the human mind. From a spiritual standpoint, her stroke takes her far beyond [...]
Mystics and Zen Masters
In many ways Thomas Merton’s philosophy and mature thought is best articulated in Mystics and Zen Masters. Despite the fact that Merton is a Trappist monk and, ipso facto, a devout Catholic, here he shows his fascination with the much wider mystical tradition embedded in all the world’s great religions. According to Merton, the purpose [...]
Franny and Zooey
Aldous Huxley, in the preface to Hubert Benoit’s Zen and the Psychology of Transformation, states: The aim of Western psychiatry is to help the troubled individual to adjust himself to the society of less troubled individuals – individuals who are observed to be well adjusted to one another and the local institutions, but about whose [...]
