Download The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage AudioBook Free
The story of four modern American Catholics who made literature out of these search for God
In the mid-twentieth century four American Catholics came to assume that the ultimate way to explore the questions of religious faith was to write about them-in works that readers of all sorts 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 health care provider in New Orleans who quit medicine to write fiction and philosophy. A pal 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 using what one of them called a "predicament shared in common."
A pilgrimage is a journey used 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 really is a story of how the Catholic faith, in their vision of things, took on forms the faithful could not have anticipated. Which is a story about the ways we look to great books and writers to help us seem sensible of your experience, about the energy of literature to change-to save-our lives.
