The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
Author: Paul Eli
The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of their search for God
In the mid–twentieth century four American Catholics came to believe that the best way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them—in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story—a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.
Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk in Kentucky; Dorothy Day the founder of the Catholic Worker in New York; Flannery O’Connor a “Christ-haunted” literary prodigy in Georgia; Walker Percy a doctor in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A friend came up with a name for them—the School of the Holy Ghost—and for three decades they exchanged letters, ardently read one another’s books, and grappled with what one of them called a “predicament shared in common.”
A pilgrimage is a journey taken in light of a story; and in The Life You Save May Be Your Own Paul Elie tells these writers’ story as a pilgrimage from the God-obsessed literary past of Dante and Dostoevsky out into the thrilling chaos of postwar American life. It is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. And it is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us make sense of our experience, about the power of literature to change—to save—our lives.
The San Francisco Chronicle
[An] engrossing, smartly conceived and perfectly realized work.—Tom Nolan
The Washington Post
Elie's long, well-documented and informative book weaves together the lives of all four figures into a single continuous chronicle. This is no mean feat, for none of the four actually intersected with the others in any sustained way, although, as was inevitable, they all came to know one another personally or literarily once they became famous. — Charlotte Allen
The New Yorker
This long, unusual book consists of interleaved biographies of four mid-century American writers -- Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O'Connor -- who, though they rarely, if ever, met, are connected by the fact that they were all serious Roman Catholics and therefore alone: isolated both from literary circles (anti-religious) and from the Church (anti-literary). Except for O'Connor, they were converts; they "read their way" to religious experience, and then became writers, so that others could pick up the trail. They were very different -- Day was devoted to social service, Percy to philosophy, O'Connor to literature, Merton to the inner journey -- and Elie doesn't love them all equally. O'Connor is his favorite. Merton is the one he struggles with, but, by virtue of his warm, clear writing (better than Merton's), he makes us care about the self-involved friar, too.
Publishers Weekly
Four 20th-century writers whose work was steeped in their shared Catholic faith come together in this masterful interplay of biography and literary criticism. Elie, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, where three of the four writers published their work, lays open the lives and writings of the monk Thomas Merton, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, and novelists Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. Drawing comparisons between their backgrounds, temperaments, circumstances and words, he reveals "four like-minded writers" whose work took the shape of a movement. Though they produced no manifesto, Elie writes, they were unified as pilgrims moving toward the same destination while taking different paths. As they sought truth through their writing, he observes, they provided "patterns of experience" that future pilgrims could read into their lives. This volume (the title is taken from a short story of the same name by O'Connor) is an ambitious undertaking and one that could easily have become ponderous, but Elie's presentation of the material is engaging and thoughtful, inspiring reflection and further study. Beginning with four separate figures joined only by their Catholicism and their work as writers, he deftly connects them, using their correspondence, travels, places of residence, their religious experiences and their responses to the tumultuous events of their times. This thoroughly researched and well-sourced work deserves attention from students of history, literature and religion, but it will be of special significance to Catholic readers interested in the expression of faith in the modern world. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
In the 1950s, Englishman Evelyn Waugh lamented the lack of a distinctively American Catholic literary tradition, even as one was finding its voice right under his nose. Farrar editor Elie (ed., A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints) uses his considerable gifts as a storyteller to weave together the biographies of four figures who became that "School of the Holy Ghost": Thomas Merton, the celebrity monk whose writing popularized American monasticism; Dorothy Day, the leftist radical who established the Catholic Worker movement; Flannery O'Connor, the Georgian author of "freakish" literary imagination; and Walker Percy, the Southern gentleman who brought faith to modern existential angst. Just what drew these eclectic authors to pre-Vatican II Catholicism and held and nurtured them there remains elusive-elusive enough to keep the reader enthralled up to the epilog. The title (from the O'Connor story of the same name) highlights Elie's motivation in drawing these voices together: their diverse yet intersecting pilgrimages offer food for reflection for Americans concerned about faith, literature, and spiritual experience. Any library that is weak in one of these authors or whose patrons have a strong interest in American spirituality has reason to place this excellent book on its shelves.-Steve Young, McHenry Cty. Coll., Crystal Lake, IL Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The lives of four spiritually hungry, sometimes renegade, and now well-known American Catholics meet in a thoughtful study of ideas in action. They were "ordinary people, on the face of it," writes FSG editor Elie (ed., A Tremor of Bliss, 1994)--"but for many of us . . . icons." Each in his or her own way, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy, brought intellectual power and activist vigor to a conservative American Catholic Church, courting controversy with their heterodoxical writings and deeds. Merton and Day, writes Elie, came to Christianity through the back door of Marxism. Day, who founded the Catholic Workers movement (and is now a candidate for sainthood), came to the conclusion that "while Communism claimed to represent the masses, the masses 'accepted the Church' instead, and put their faith in it," such that it seemed the most revolutionary thing to do was to go where the masses (and Mass) were and reform from within. More withdrawn from the world until the end of his life, when he became an activist against the war in Vietnam, Merton was a contemplative monk whose writings, such as The Seven Storey Mountain, became handbooks for spiritual seekers; ever self-critical, Merton always "worried that he was serving up 'professional spirituality' instead of describing what the experience of God was like," an experience that the Georgia-born novelist O'Connor wrestled to put on the page as well, while the Louisiana writer and physician Percy strived ever to balance the sacred and the profane in works such as the roman а clef The Moviegoer. These four, contemporaries all, were only dimly aware of each other at the outset, but as time went on, scattered acrossthe country, they came to form something of a school--a unity, Elie gracefully observes, "will be that of pilgrims who are taking different routes to the same destination, conversing at long distance from time to time." That conversation--and this lucid work--will greatly interest readers on literary and spiritual quests of their own.
Books about: Confirmative Evaluation or Texas Mortgage Brokerage
Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century
Author: Marc Sageman
In the post-September 11 world, Al Qaeda is no longer the central organizing force that aids or authorizes terrorist attacks or recruits terrorists. It is now more a source of inspiration for terrorist acts carried out by independent local groups that have branded themselves with the Al Qaeda name. Building on his previous groundbreaking research on the Al Qaeda network, forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman has greatly expanded his research to explain how Islamic terrorism emerges and operates in the twenty-first century.
In Leaderless Jihad, Sageman rejects the views that place responsibility for terrorism on society or a flawed, predisposed individual. Instead, he argues, the individual, outside influence, and group dynamics come together in a four-step process through which Muslim youth become radicalized. First, traumatic events either experienced personally or learned about indirectly spark moral outrage. Individuals interpret this outrage through a specific ideology, more felt and understood than based on doctrine. Usually in a chat room or other Internet-based venues, adherents share this moral outrage, which resonates with the personal experiences of others. The outrage is acted on by a group, either online or offline.
Leaderless Jihad offers a ray of hope. Drawing on historical analogies, Sageman argues that the zeal of jihadism is self-terminating; eventually its followers will turn away from violence as a means of expressing their discontent. The book concludes with Sageman's recommendations for the application of his research to counterterrorism law enforcement efforts.
The Washington Post - Fawaz A. Gerges
Based on biographical profiles he has compiled of 500 jihadists who used violence against the United States and its allies, Leaderless Jihad sets out to explain how people become terrorists: What drives some individuals to ideological violence? What is the tipping point? How do terrorist networks radicalize, mobilize and militarize their recruits? In Sageman's view, terrorists are not born, they are made, and terrorism has less to do with culture or religion than with politics. He makes a convincing case that these assertions are neither partisan nor speculative but based on hard evidence, carefully weighed.
Table of Contents:
Preface viiIntroduction: Understanding the Path to Radicalism 3
How to Study Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century 13
The Globalization of Jihadi Terror 29
The Jihadist's Profile 47
Radicalization in the Diaspora 71
The Atlantic Divide 89
Terrorism in the Age of the Internet 109
The Rise of Leaderless Jihad 125
Combating Global Islamist Terrorism 147
Notes 179
Bibliography 185
Index 193
Acknowledgments 199
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