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On Family, History, and the Kingdom of God
Riverhead Books
April 2009
On Sale: April 2, 2009
240 pages ISBN: 1594488592 EAN: 9781594488597 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Religion
From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain, a stirring,
inspiring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical
inquiry—a dazzling chronicle of a personal and national
identity reclaimed. Erik Reece’s grandfather was a Bible-thumping, fire-and-
brimstone Baptist preacher. He loved to hunt and fish and
explore the Kentucky woods, but for him, existence on this
earth was about denying the pleasures of this life in
preparation for the next. Erik’s father was a Baptist
minister, too. But at the age of thirty-three—not
coincidentally, Jesus’ age when he was crucified— Erik’s
father violently took his own life, and Erik ended up
spending much of his childhood in the care of his
grandparents. So, while Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with
Christianity, he also grew up with an acute awareness of a
part of the country suffering ongoing economic,
environmental, and even spiritual collapse. When he himself
neared age thirty-three, he found unexpected comfort and
guidance in his intellectual hero Thomas Jefferson’s famous
Jefferson Bible, especially when he began to track
similarities between it and the Zen-like message of the
Gospel of Thomas. Inspired, he undertook what would become
a spiritual and literary quest—to identify an “American
gospel” coursing through the work of both great and
forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt
Whitman to William James to Lynn Margulis. In synthesizing
that gospel—one that prizes the pleasures and glories of
this earth—Reece began to find a way to a spiritual and
intellectual peace with his own American soul. The result of Reece’s journey is a deeply personal but also
deeply thought out, inspiring, and stirring book, delivered
almost like a secular sermon, about personal, political,
and historical demons—and the geniuses we can and must call
on to combat them.
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