Paths to the Personal: Thinkers on the Way to Postcritical and Theopoetic Depths

'In this age of electronic noise, political antagonism, and general discontent, Paths to the Personal delivers to the spiritually hungry a delicious feast of peaceful promise.' Walter Gulick, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Humanities and Religious Studies, Montana State University BillingsPaths to the Personal: Thinkers on the Way to Postcritical and Theopoetic Depths seeks to define and explore the dimension of the personal underlying all knowing, doing, being, and religion. Using a lens combining Michael Polanyi’s postcritical and Stanley Hopper’s theopoetic thought, which carries the author into and beyond their explorative depths of the personal, Keiser asks to what degree the personal is present in the thinking of Augustine, Tillich, H.R. Niebuhr, Fritz Buri, Freud, Mircea Eliade, Merleau-Ponty, William Poteat, Hopper, and Polanyi. The immersive issues in these pages are: how we know; how words (symbols, metaphors, myths, and religious talk) work; contributions of philosophy to justice and peace-making; and the nature of religious thinking and being. While not focused on Quaker thought and spirituality, the author's Quaker perspective undergirds these inquiries.
Explores the depths of the personal through postcritical and theopoetic lenses, and fleshes out the richness of insights and limits in Augustine's - as well major 20th-century thinkers' - understanding of our deepest self.