Sacred Stories: A Celebration of the Power of Story to Transform and Heal - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0062508520 ISBN 13: 9780062508522

Publisher: Harper San Francisco, 1993

Synopsis

An eclectic assortment of today's bestselling authors, storytellers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Sacred Stories celebrates the healing role of stories in our individual and communal lives.

Maya Angelou offers a poem that recognizes the great diversity in the human family but reminds that "Wee are more alike, my friends, than we are unalike." Robert Bly serves "Story Food for Women and for Men." Sam Keen explores the contemporary "mythic battleground." Vice President Al Gore explores the unwritten rules in the story of modern industrial civilization. Clarissa Pinkola Estes's "Story as Medicine" honors story's ability to heal the wounded psyche.

In the midst of modern lives filled with noise and distractions, Sacred Stories, celebrates a renaissance in storytelling and story understanding; one that offers a means to look inward, at the story of our own lives, and outward, toward the story of our shard life earth.

About this title

About the Author:

Charles Simpkinson is the publisher of Common Boundary and a practicing clinical psychologist. He has had a faculty appointment at the Johns Hopkins Medical School in the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science and is an adjunct faculty member at the Union Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio.

From Publishers Weekly:

These essays, first presented at a Common Boundary conference, take innovative views of the sacred and of narrative. Men's movement guru Sam Keen examines peanut butter as a metaphor for story because he continues to have a taste for it, despite the fact that other adults feel they have outgrown it; he also claims controversially that mythology is ethnically specific and that non-Native Americans "will not find our animating stories in Native American myths." Edith Sullwold explores dreams as personal record and highlights their cryptic nature by relating how Jung himself admitted being unable to interpret his own dreams. Richard Lewis believes that "the television set has become a substitute storyteller," and John L. Johnson compares the continuous stories of the Dogon culture of Africa to those of participants in 12-Step programs. A few inclusions feel gratuitous, such as Allan B. Chinen's brief examination of fairy tales, which covers the traditional ground that most of these authors are moving away from. But overall this is a thought-provoking collection that offers inventive perspectives.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper San Francisco
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0062508520
• ISBN 13: 9780062508522
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Simpkinson Charles, Simpkinson Anne