This article needs additional citations for verification .(August 2007) |
![]() First edition | |
Author | Daniel Quinn |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subject | Autobiography |
Publisher | The Hard Rain Press |
Publication date | 1994 |
Media type | Print (Paperback) |
Pages | 172 pp |
ISBN | 1-885664-00-1 |
OCLC | 31609040 |
Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest is a book by Daniel Quinn, published in 1994, and written largely as an autobiography blended with additional philosophical reflections. It details how Quinn arrived at the ideas behind his 1992 novel Ishmael and articulates upon some of these ideas.
Although primarily nonfiction in content, Providence is written with a fictional backdrop, in which the reader is presented as someone who has read Ishmael and sneaked into Daniel Quinn's house at night to ask Quinn for further information regarding his inspirations for the novel and its philosophical ideas. Quinn, though tired, welcomes the reader into his house and opens himself up to the reader's questions. Throughout the story, Quinn narrates as though replying to questions asked by (the character of) the reader, which Quinn “restates” in his answers and explanations; the voice of the reader is never directly heard.
Quinn begins by describing the earliest incarnation of a book like Ishmael back in 1977, which Quinn at the time called Man and Alien. This manuscript was revised over the next several years, resulting in five more incarnations (The Genesis Transcript, The Book of Nahash , The Book of the Damned, and two entitled Another Story to Be In), none of which Quinn could successfully get published. At last, though, Quinn heard of the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award, which called for creative solutions to global problems. To win the award, though, Quinn was required to translate his long-brewing thoughts for the first time into a work of fiction: a novel. Quinn won the award with Ishmael but was left unsure, until now, about what he should write as a follow-up.
Quinn details basic memories of his Depression-era childhood in Omaha, Nebraska: specifically, the occurrence a dream in 1941 that he feels has influenced the rest of his life. In the dream, a tree is blocking the middle of a road he is traversing. A beetle crawls down the trunk to greet him and tells him that itself and other animals deliberately downed the tree to get Quinn's attention in order to talk with him. Quinn is dumbfounded as the beetle says that the animals need to tell him the secret of their lives. Quinn is then expected to follow a deer into the forest, because he is for some reason needed by the animals, but before he can venture on, he awakes.
Quinn recounts the gambling habits of his father (who he feels may have been friends with Meyer Lansky) and the sudden appearance of severe obsessive-compulsive tendencies in his mother. Quinn's parents habitually fought, each unable to understand the other's behaviors. Quinn feels his reaction to this was to try to perfect in himself what was unachievable with his parents in their relationship. Quinn's desire for perfection led him to an interest in the arts and a belief in Catholicism. Quinn received a full scholarship to St. Louis University because of his writing, though left after two years to devote his life to his religion, by becoming a Trappist monk at age nineteen. Greatly influenced by Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain , Quinn went to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. At Gethsemani, Merton in fact became Quinn’s personal spiritual director. As a postulant at the monastery, Quinn decided after a troublesome moment at the monastery, involving a miscommunication with a novice, that he had to either completely submit his will to that of God or else he had to leave the monastery. Summoning his strength, Quinn made the choice of submission to the complete guidance of God. The next time he stepped outside (having been indoors for three entire weeks), Quinn experienced an unexpected moment of explosive, positive emotion, which he interpreted as infused contemplation, meaning utter centeredness on God: a feeling he describes as a "rage of joy." Quinn convinced himself at the time that this awe-striking moment of beauty with the world was evidence of God's approval of his decision to submit. Quinn told an incredulous Merton of this amazing experience, but was soon discharged from the monastery by Merton, who attributed the reason for Quinn's dismissal to the recent results of a Rorschach test.
Quinn was crushed by his expulsion and began to see a psychoanalyst, as recommended by Merton. Quinn continued with his lifelong inability to understand his own sexuality, largely since his father always assumed him to be homosexual and because his current therapist thought him unready to be in any serious relationships. Quinn, however, soon married a woman who later left him for another man. During this whole time, Quinn continued to struggle with his self-destructive need to be perfect. When Quinn talked to a priest who claimed to worry more about people than rules, Quinn's religious worldview began to crumble and he abandoned the faith. [1] Quinn then got a job in educational publishing, which instigated his questioning of the educational system of the United States; this came with the rise of the Flower Children of the 1960s. Quinn briefly mentions the failure of his second marriage and his own willing movement toward going back to psychotherapy. Quinn began to realize in therapy that his entire technique with social situations was to merely trick others into thinking he was worth knowing, while he actually believed himself valueless. One day, however, he was idly making a list of all his valuable attributes when he suddenly realized that he did not need to try to fake his personality in front of people; he did not need to be perfect—merely human. Quinn explains that this newfound insight gave him the courage to ask out his future wife, Rennie, on their first date.
Quinn then delivers his most recent understanding of learning and education, notably including the idea that formal education is an unnecessary social institution, since children learn automatically by following the behaviors of fellow members of their culture and by pursuing their own innate interests (which rigidly-structured public schools largely stop from happening). He also refers to his discontents with how history is studied in its disregard for tribal societies, reiterating many of the themes from Ishmael. Finally, he examines religion, including his own more recent advocacy of animism, which he considers the one-time world religion with its refreshing lack of any sacred text, institutions, or dogma. He revisits the memory of his “rage of joy” moment, now understating it in animist terms. He concludes with the thought that many needy people (like himself prior to his epiphany) are just those who do not feel needed. He asserts that the reader should feel needed because he or she is needed: needed desperately by the community of life to understand humanity's forgotten interdependence with the rest of that community. [2]
Ishmael is a 1992 philosophical novel by Daniel Quinn. The novel examines the hidden cultural biases driving modern civilization and explores themes of ethics, sustainability, and global catastrophe. Largely framed as a Socratic conversation between two characters, Ishmael aims to expose that several widely accepted assumptions of modern society, such as human supremacy, are actually cultural myths that produce catastrophic consequences for humankind and the environment. The novel was awarded the $500,000 Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991, a year before its formal publication.
Daniel Clarence Quinn was an American author, cultural critic, and publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticized this term for portraying the environment as separate from human life, thus creating a false dichotomy. Instead, Quinn referred to his philosophy as "new tribalism".
Thomas Merton was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist and scholar of comparative religion. On May 26, 1949, he was ordained to the Catholic priesthood and given the name "Father Louis". He was a member of the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, near Bardstown, Kentucky, living there from 1941 to his death.
Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was a German Reformed theologian, philosopher, and biblical scholar known for his attempt to reconcile the criticisms of the Enlightenment with traditional Protestant Christianity. He also became influential in the evolution of higher criticism, and his work forms part of the foundation of the modern field of hermeneutics. Because of his profound effect on subsequent Christian thought, he is often called the "Father of Modern Liberal Theology" and is considered an early leader in liberal Christianity. The neo-orthodoxy movement of the twentieth century, typically seen to be spearheaded by Karl Barth, was in many ways an attempt to challenge his influence. As a philosopher he was a leader of German Romanticism. Schleiermacher is considered the most important Protestant theologian between John Calvin and Karl Barth.
Ishmael was the first son of Abraham, the common patriarch of the Abrahamic religions, through his wife Sara's handmaiden Hagar. According to the Genesis account, he died at the age of 137. According to biblical tradition, he is the ancestor of the Arabs.
My Ishmael is a 1997 novel by Daniel Quinn that is a followup to Ishmael. With its time frame largely simultaneous with Ishmael, its plot precedes the fictional events of its 1996 spiritual successor, The Story of B. Like Ishmael, My Ishmael largely revolves around a Socratic dialogue between the sapient gorilla, Ishmael, and a student, involving his philosophy regarding tribal society. Ishmael's pupil in My Ishmael, however, is a twelve-year-old female protagonist, Julie Gerchak, and the plot details not only her visits to Ishmael but also her journey to Africa in order to prepare Ishmael's return to his homeland.
The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani is a Catholic monastery in the United States near Bardstown, Kentucky, in Nelson County. The abbey is part of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, better known as the Trappists. Founded on December 21, 1848, and raised to an abbey in 1851, Gethsemani is considered to be the motherhouse of all Trappist and Trappistine monasteries in the United States. Gethsemani is the oldest Trappist monastery in the country that is still operating.
The Seven Storey Mountain is the 1948 autobiography of Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk and priest who was a noted author in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Merton finished the book in 1946 at the age of 31, five years after entering Gethsemani Abbey near Bardstown, Kentucky. The title refers to the mountain of purgatory from Dante's Purgatorio.
The Story of B is a 1996 philosophical novel written by Daniel Quinn and published by Bantam Publishing. It chronicles a young priest's movement away from his religion and toward the environmentalist teachings of an international lecturer known as "B".
Philosophical Fragments is a Christian philosophical work written by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in 1844. It was the second of three works written under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus; the other two were De omnibus dubitandum est in 1841 and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments in 1846.
The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin is a philosophical work written by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in 1844.
Beyond Civilization is a book by Daniel Quinn written as a non-fiction follow-up to his acclaimed Ishmael trilogy—Ishmael, The Story of B, and My Ishmael—as well as to his autobiography, Providence: The Story of a Fifty-Year Vision Quest. Beyond Civilization is written both to illuminate further the arguments and ideas made in his previous books and as a sort of guide to offer possible solutions to the problems he sees with the current state of civilization.
The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard has been a major influence in the development of 20th-century philosophy, especially existentialism and postmodernism. Søren Kierkegaard was a 19th-century Danish philosopher who has been labeled by many as the "Father of Existentialism", although there are some in the field who express doubt in labeling him an existentialist to begin with. His philosophy also influenced the development of existential psychology.
Mystical theology is the branch of theology in the Christian tradition that deals with divine encounter and the self-communication of God with the faithful; such as to explain mystical practices and states, as induced by contemplative practices such as contemplative prayer, called theoria from the Greek for contemplation.
Albert Einstein's religious views have been widely studied and often misunderstood. Albert Einstein stated "I believe in Spinoza's God". He did not believe in a personal God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naïve. He clarified however that, "I am not an atheist", preferring to call himself an agnostic, or a "religious nonbeliever." In other interviews, he stated that he thought that there is a "lawgiver" who sets the laws of the universe. Einstein also stated he did not believe in life after death, adding "one life is enough for me." He was closely involved in his lifetime with several humanist groups. Einstein rejected a conflict between science and religion, and held that cosmic religion was necessary for science.
The pre-existence of Christ asserts the existence of Christ prior to his incarnation as Jesus. One of the relevant Bible passages is John 1:1–18 where, in the Trinitarian interpretation, Christ is identified with a pre-existent divine hypostasis called the Logos. There are nontrinitarian views that question the aspect of personal pre-existence, the aspect of divinity, or both.
Four Upbuilding Discourses (1843) is a book by Søren Kierkegaard.
Three Upbuilding Discourses (1844) is a book by Søren Kierkegaard.
Four Upbuilding Discourses (1844) is the last of the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses published during the years 1843–1844 by Søren Kierkegaard. He published three more discourses on "crucial situations in life" in 1845, the situations being confession, marriage, and death. These three areas of life require a "decision made in time".
Raymond Joseph David Stanislaus Flanagan was a Catholic priest and Trappist monk.