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Published Nov 2018
256 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
A provocative and deeply moving account from one of the most compelling religious thinkers at work today, Why Religion? explores the spiritual dimension of human experience.
Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? Why do so many still believe? And how do various traditions still shape the way people experience everything from sexuality to politics, whether they are religious or not? In Why Religion? Elaine Pagels looks to her own life to help address these questions.st importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face. These questions took on a new urgency for Pagels when dealing with unimaginable loss - the death of her young son, followed a year later by the shocking loss of her husband. Here she interweaves a personal story with the work that she loves, illuminating how, for better and worse, religious traditions have shaped how we understand ourselves; how we relate to one another; and, most importantly, how to get through the most difficult challenges we face.
Drawing upon the perspectives of neurologists, anthropologists, and historians, as well as her own research, Pagels opens unexpected ways of understanding persistent religious aspects of our culture.
"Starred Review. This luminous memoir strips religion to its elementary particles: love, suffering, and mystery." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Engaging both head and heart ... this brilliant book ... stimulates intellectual curiosity and thought while giving equal weight to Pagel's emotional life." - Booklist
"A meaningful tale of pain and hope on the edges of faith." - Kirkus
"In this compelling, honest, and learned memoir, Elaine Pagels, takes us inside her own life in a stirring and illuminating effort to explain religion's enduring appeal. This is a powerful book about the most powerful of forces." - Jon Meacham
"Pagels has done it again, but more personally. The scholar's tale of loving, grieving, enduring, and searching will grab readers at the outset and never let them go. A memorable story unforgettably told." - Madeleine Albright
"Elaine Pagels' study of new gospels and revelations challenged our understanding of ancient Christianity. In this mesmerizing memoir, we see how she was also grappling with devastating loss and struggling within to find 'the light that never fails,' even in deepest anger and guilt, grief and desolation. A must read." - Karen L. King
"Elaine Pagels has written an extraordinary memoir of loss, spiritual struggle, illumination and insight - emotionally heartrending, intellectually exciting, a model of what a memoir should be." - Joyce Carol Oates
"With characteristic intelligence and wisdom, Elaine Pagels lays bare her own life-shattering losses, offering up the possibility that suffering might afford each of us membership in a profoundly connected human - and cosmic - community." - Tracy K. Smith
"A magnificent, searing, soul-affirming memoir. Pagels shines the bright light of her brilliant mind on the most essential of human dilemmas: how do we go on in the face of immeasurable loss? I came away from this book transformed." - Dani Shapiro
This information about Why Religion? was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Elaine Pagels is a preeminent academic whose impressive scholarship has earned her international respect. The Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University, Pagels was awarded the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Fellowships in three consecutive years. She is the author of The Gnostic Gospels, Beyond Belief, and Revelations.
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