Letters from the American Desert: Signposts of a Journey, a Vision

ISBN-13: 9780967042114 / Angielski / Twarda / 2008 / 174 str.

Frederick Glaysher

Opis

Twenty years in the making, inLetters from the American Desert, Glaysher reflects on the cultural, political, and religious history of Western and non-Western civilizations, pondering the dilemmas of postmodernity, in a compelling struggle for spiritual knowledge and truth. In what is a highly autobiographical work, fully cognizant of the relativism and nihilism of modern life, Glaysher finds a deeper meaning and purpose in the universal Vision of Baha'u'llah, as expressed in the Reform Bahai Faith. Confronting the antinomies of the soul, grounded in the dialectic, Glaysher charts a path beyond the postmodern desert. Alluding extensively to Martin Luther and W. B. Yeats at All Souls Chapel, "metaphors for poetry," from Yeats's book A Vision, Glaysher invites Reform Bahais and others to consider the example of the global, universal, moderate form of the Bahai Teachings as interpreted by Abdul-Baha, Baha'u'llah's son, who had spoken throughout the West in Europe, England, and the United States from 1911 to 1913. Abdul-Baha's message of the oneness of God, all religions, and humankind holds out a new hope and peaceful Vision for a world in spiritual and global crisis. Far from a theocracy, the Reform Bahai Faith envisions a modest separation of church and state, as the will of God, in an unorganized religion, a universal synthesis of all spiritual and wisdom traditions, in harmony and balance with universal peace, in a global age of pluralism, where religious belief is a distinctive mark of the individual, not collective, communal identity."