Darling
A Spiritual Autobiography
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
An award–winning writer delivers a major reckoning with religion, place, and sexuality in the aftermath of 9/11
Hailed in The Washington Post as “one of the most eloquent and probing public intellectuals in America,” Richard Rodriguez now considers religious violence worldwide, growing public atheism in the West, and his own mortality.
Rodriguez’s stylish new memoir—the first book in a decade from the Pulitzer Prize finalist—moves from Jerusalem to Silicon Valley, from Moses to Liberace, from Lance Armstrong to Mother Teresa. Rodriguez is a homosexual who writes with love of the religions of the desert that exclude him. He is a passionate, unorthodox Christian who is always mindful of his relationship to Judaism and Islam because of a shared belief in the God who revealed himself within an ecology of emptiness. And at the center of this book is a consideration of women—their importance to Rodriguez’s spiritual formation and their centrality to the future of the desert religions.
Only a mind as elastic and refined as Rodriguez’s could bind these threads together into this wonderfully complex tapestry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rodriguez (Hunger of Memory) wrote so many well-received essays on the American religious climate after 9/11, often in the context of his own struggle in faith, that he turned them into a book-length narrative about his Roman Catholic formation during the past decade. His pilgrimage begins with "the realization that the God I worship is... the same desert God the terrorists prayed ," meanders through ruminations on "small wounds" in a meditation that involves Lance Armstrong and Sheryl Crow, and comes to a slow finish with a smile from Christopher Hitchens and a brief tribute to Mother Teresa. Much like his writing, Rodriguez has been all over the place, traveling, thinking, observing. By the end of his book, he leaves the reader feeling like it all fits together, as if all his essays give "a sense no, not a sense, a reason why everyone matters." And more importantly, Rodriguez doesn't beat this discovery over the reader's head but unpacks it gently, over the course of years, in seemingly disjointed stories that explain one writer's journey to a God of many.
