Road of the Heart's Desire: An Essay on the Cycles of Story and Song - Softcover

Dunne, John S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268040133 ISBN 13: 9780268040130

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002

Synopsis

“John Dunne has been pursuing human wholeness through the course of his many books. His insights into our completeness come out of his unique journey leading to the healing of his own separations: from the paths not taken earlier in life that return to join the one consciously chosen; from his relationships with others, leading to his meeting other people where we are most alone; and, ultimately, from his discovery of God’s presence in his own experience of longing.” ―Carol Ochs, Hebrew Union College

“The old master has been at work again! John Dunne provides a rare combination of the poignantly personal with the utterly universal, a work of intense thought and reflection that erupts into song, a book that like a good friend pauses and responds to your questions about the life of the spirit as it pauses and responds to John Dunne’s own doubts and difficulties and desires.” ―John T. Noonan, author of The Lustre of Our Country

“Dunne is one of our finest writers of spiritual literature. His intellectual breadth alone marks his work as significant. His poetic style prompts slow and careful reading. . . . John Dunne offers nourishment to which we can return often.” ―Denise Carmody, Santa Clara University

About this title

About the Author:

John S. Dunne is the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of more than fifteen books including Reading the Gospel and The Mystic Road of Love, both published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

From Booklist:

No mere elaboration of doctrine, theology comes alive as a joyous celebration in the work of John Dunne, who here fuses myth and music, philosophy and poetry, to limn the great melodic-narrative circle that binds all of humanity within the arc of divine love. Beginning with the primal harmony of all things, before time was, Dunne traces the changes that have sundered race from race, then individual from individual. Then he charts the path each soul must travel, impelled by the "negative love" of loneliness, toward final reunion with God and all of humanity. With a marvelously capacious eclecticism, Dunne enlists a luminous company of guides to help us recognize the markers along this redemptive path: Heraclitus and Heidegger; Mozart and Stravinsky; the Psalmist and the Gilgamesh poet; the Buddha and Saint Paul. But particularly fruitful inspiration comes from the fabulist J. R. R. Tolkien, who invests storytelling with rare power, his best-known tale a promise that a journey faithfully pursued leads finally to joy and peace. The ecstatic hope kindled by this promise inevitably breaks through the constraints of exposition: Dunne concludes with two short song cycles of his own composing, both radiant with profound faith. Bryce Christensen
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About this edition

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0268040133
• ISBN 13: 9780268040130
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160