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Title details for Backpacking with the Saints by Belden C. Lane - Available

Backpacking with the Saints

Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice

by Belden C. Lane
ebook
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2 of 2 copies available
Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters—Bell Mountain Wilderness with Søren Kierkegaard, Moonshine Hollow with Thich Nhat Hanh—demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature. The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Just as the wilderness offered revelations to the early Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder. Lane engages the practice not only with a wide range of spiritual writings—Celtic, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi Muslim—but with the fascination of other lovers of the backcountry, from John Muir and Ed Abbey to Bill Plotkin and Cheryl Strayed. In this intimate and down-to-earth narrative, backpacking is shown to be a spiritual practice that allows the discovery of God amidst the beauty and unexpected terrors of nature. Adoration, Lane suggests, is the most appropriate human response to what we cannot explain, but have nonetheless learned to love. An enchanting narrative for Christians of all denominations, Backpacking with the Saints is an inspiring exploration of how solitude, simplicity, and mindfulness are illuminated and encouraged by the discipline of backcountry wandering, and of how the wilderness itself becomes a way of knowing-an ecology of the soul.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 3, 2014

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780199394173

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780199394173
      • File size: 455 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 10, 2014
      Lane’s work blends genres, combining the literature of the outdoors with the formal literature of the spiritual as he reviews the work of the world’s prominent religious and spiritual writers and ties their insights to the features and experiences of exploring the natural world. A respected professor of theological studies at Saint Louis University and a frequent backpacker, Lane (The Solace of Fierce Landscapes) juxtaposes the academic with the personal, presenting brief historical summaries of thinkers like Rumi, Therese of Liseux, and Thich Nhat Hanh while using his own life experiences and backpacking trips to parallel certain spiritual insights from his reading. Lane’s prose is lush and descriptive, but occasionally self-indulgent as he encounters the difficulties of expressing the sublime and the spiritual in words. The book also starts slowly, overly laden in theory. Yet it eventually becomes more compelling as the author situates his useful introduction to the joys of backpacking and the work of the featured thinkers in his open and tender detailing of his life’s trajectory, creating pleasure for readers of all genres.

    • Booklist

      November 15, 2014
      Lane, a professor of religion at St. Louis University, offers an attractively genre-crossing companion for readers seeking inspiring meditation guidance. An experienced hiker, he takes introspective and celebratory spiritual illumination from a variety of mostly American wilderness areas, each hike accompanied by a meditative reading from such varied sources as John of the Cross, Kierkegaard, Teilhard de Chardin, and Gandhi. In describing his own life experiences as well as wilderness areas in the Ozarks, Aravaipa Canyon, and Ireland's revered retreat areas, he offers both practical advice (how to lighten a backpack) as well as gracefully tying back the solo hikes to experiences in leading men's recovery groups and his marriage. The carefully balanced writing about landscape, physical demands, spiritual awakenings, and literary companionship allows the reader to see, feel, and join in the meditation. An excellent companion to works on pilgrimage, such as Dispenza's The Way of the Traveler (1999).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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