Read more
For this inquiry into sacred kinship, the author has taken for his text the verse from Genesis 2: "And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." The rest of the book addresses the question, "What does it mean to be a living soul?"
The argument of the book dedicates itself to the proposition that our consciousness of the world is fundamentally whole. Specific texts from a wide range of sources support this hypothesis. They point to "the soul as the seat of the individual waking consciousness and of the moral and intellectual character," which is how Richard Tarnas describes the discovery that crowns the life and work of Socrates.
If the soul is sacred, as traditional Western thought has claimed, if the happiness of our country and our own happiness securely rest on this foundation, as these readings argue they do, then we do well to inquire into the matter, no matter the time and effort the inquiry requires.
About the author
Alan Griesinger graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and received his Master of Arts in English from the University of Oregon. Subsequently, he taught junior and senior high school students at Naples Central School in Naples, New York, for twenty-eight years. This is where Mr. Griesinger's true education began--where colleagues, parents, and students gave him a solid grounding in the principles and rituals of community life. Since retirement, he has written three books. Taken as a whole, they record in a series of related essays a pilgrimage of the spirit. Individually, each work aims at describing a place where people have traditionally found shelter and healing. In the first book, it is wisdom; in the second, it is self-government; and in this third book, it's what the book of Genesis refers to as a "living soul." These three works, like the pilgrimages of Odysseus and Dante in the
Odyssey and the
Commedia, tell the story of one whose spirit would come home.
