Revealing, in an original and provocative study, the mystical contents of the works of famous atheists Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, Donna Lazenby shows how these thinkers' refusal to construe worldviews on available reductive models brought them to offer radically alternative pictures of life which maintain its mysteriousness, and promote a mystical way of knowing. A Mystical Philosophy contributes to the contemporary resurgence of interest in Spirituality, but from an entirely new direction. This book provides a warning against reductive scientific and philosophical models that impoverish our understanding of ourselves and the world, and a powerful endorsement of ways of knowing that give art, and a restored concept of contemplation, their consummative place.
A gem of a book.' Graham Tomlin, Bishop of Kensington Many of our everyday encounters in the world are touched by the divine, if we were only aware of it. We may find it impossible to miss God in the great interruptions of human existence, but God often finds a humbler dwelling-place . . . Donna Lazenby was in a packed underground carriage when it was taken siege by a group of musicians ripe to start a ceilidh. The eruption into dull passivity of joy seemed a herald of the Kingdom of God. And so she began to write a series of reflections, some prosaic, others more poetic in tone, that open up ways of seeing light in darkness; love in places of desolation; in-breaking life when all seems tired and old. But the coming of this Kingdom is also revealed in protest, in the world's cry against a pervasive sense of alienation, while an allegedly 'secular' culture steals and presents the claims of the Gospel as its own. And so, Divine Sparks calls us to be prophets: visionaries able to discern and proclaim God's incoming Kingdom, as it arrives by day and night. Praise for the author's A Mystical Theology (Bloomsbury, 2014): [Written] with elegance and originality Catherine Pickstock, Professor of Metaphysics and Poetics, University of Cambridge
Revealing, in an original and provocative study, the mystical contents of the works of famous atheists Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch, Donna Lazenby shows how these thinkers' refusal to construe worldviews on available reductive models brought them to offer radically alternative pictures of life which maintain its mysteriousness, and promote a mystical way of knowing. A Mystical Philosophy contributes to the contemporary resurgence of interest in Spirituality, but from an entirely new direction. This book provides a warning against reductive scientific and philosophical models that impoverish our understanding of ourselves and the world, and a powerful endorsement of ways of knowing that give art, and a restored concept of contemplation, their consummative place.
A gem of a book.' Graham Tomlin, Bishop of Kensington Many of our everyday encounters in the world are touched by the divine, if we were only aware of it. We may find it impossible to miss God in the great interruptions of human existence, but God often finds a humbler dwelling-place . . . Donna Lazenby was in a packed underground carriage when it was taken siege by a group of musicians ripe to start a ceilidh. The eruption into dull passivity of joy seemed a herald of the Kingdom of God. And so she began to write a series of reflections, some prosaic, others more poetic in tone, that open up ways of seeing light in darkness; love in places of desolation; in-breaking life when all seems tired and old. But the coming of this Kingdom is also revealed in protest, in the world's cry against a pervasive sense of alienation, while an allegedly 'secular' culture steals and presents the claims of the Gospel as its own. And so, Divine Sparks calls us to be prophets: visionaries able to discern and proclaim God's incoming Kingdom, as it arrives by day and night. Praise for the author's A Mystical Theology (Bloomsbury, 2014): [Written] with elegance and originality Catherine Pickstock, Professor of Metaphysics and Poetics, University of Cambridge
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