Ascent of the mountain, flight of the dove;: An invitation to religious studies

The essence of Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove remains intact: its vision of religious studies as sustained reflection on our lifelong voyage to discover who we are. The story we choose for ourselves, the story we live, can sacralize or secularize our lives and our world by the way in which we choose to relate to it. With this awareness of the story dimension of life, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove opens us to awe, reverence, and wonder at the risks and possibilities of human freedom. This book is even more important than it was thirty years ago. We need religion to strike deeply into the self, away from public glare. Unless Americans become more sophisticated about the language of the self, inner life will shrivel. In addition, our people will continue to be vulnerable to fundamentalist movements. Such movements take over too many innocents. They promise, and sometimes deliver, a touching happiness. But they do so by closing the spirit in a powerful and dangerous way. Families and schools do not provide a large and critical vocabulary by which to express the inner longings of the spirit. The souls of many are parched and they gladly accept water, any water, from those who offer it. Th e liberation of the religious spirit from trivial, closed, and simplistic systems of thought can only be achieved through the development of a critical language, exercises, and disciplines that open rather than close the mind, that lead to higher viewpoints, breakthroughs, and new syntheses, in a constant enlargement of spirit. Novak's book leads us to that place. Michael Novak is George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. He has twice been the UN Ambassador to the UN Human Rights Commission and is the director of AEI's social and political studies. He is the author of twenty-five books and numerous scholarly articles. 240 pages.