Taking A Long Road Home [Hardcover]

Description: This memoir invites readers to explore stages of their own spiritual journey. Bianchi graphically describes his path from an Italian immigrant family on the West Coast, through twenty years as a Jesuit, to being a professor of religious studies at Emory University. As he develops a more this-worldly inner life, Bianchi struggles with church teachings about Christ, sexuality, and authority. He candidly reveals how failed marriages gave him a humbler grasp of meeting the transcendent in everyday problems. He embraces a contemplative spirituality that links Buddhist and Taoist practices with western mysticism. With a foot in Christianity, he shows how to walk a way of inter-spirituality as a meaningful road for the contemporary seeker. For Bianchi this involves becoming a metaphorical Christian as he moves away from religious certitudes of early life to find spirit in nature and humanity. Bianchi, a well-known writer on spiritual aging, challenges Baby Boomers to craft a contemplative life that works for them today. With his wife and two cats, he discovers a home for body and spirit along the banks of the Oconee River in Athens, Georgia. Endorsements: Eugene Bianchi's memoir will interest, indeed fascinate, anyone who has lived through the turbulent yet gripping religious transitioning of the last three-quarter century. He emerges as a successfully failed Jesuit and a sojourner in faith as in life. His Taking a Long Road Home is an outstanding example of beautifully sustained narrative, headlong in parts, erudite, disarmingly truthful and humble, deftly cumulative, metaphoric, sure and yet tentative. It deserves a quiet reading place beyond distractions. It will be a challenge to set aside before its finish. --Robert Brophy Professor of English Emeritus California State University, Long Beach. Eugene Bianchi's memoir displays a stunning humility--in the root sense of the word. Earthy and courageous, it charts the journey of one man's search for (alcF