Overview: Paths 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.

Verdict: Although a book that sounds and looks, at first glance, as something weighed down in its own prose heavy text on electronic noise, political antagonism, and general discontent, what author Melvin Keiser provides the reader is an extensive menu of thinkers who provide such guidance from distinct but largely compatible perspectives.

Aptly entitled Paths to the Personal: Thinkers on the Way to Postcritical and Theopoetic Depths, the book presents the authors quest to understand what personal, at its most profound, actually means.

While not focused on Quaker thought and spirituality, persay, between his post-critical theopoetics and his Quaker Silence, Keiser still reveals an impassioned, and at times imaginative in its honesty, and always rigorous in its contemplation, viewpoint on what personal is to each of us.

So, here in this age of electronic noise, political antagonism, and general discontent, where can one find guidance to coherent living that matters? Well, Keiser provides the reader with not just his own dedicated thoughts, but seasons his thought process, with such additional influences as Augustine’s reflections and confessions and, amongst others, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of figure and ground.

In closing, Paths to the Personal delivers to the spiritually hungry a delicious feast of peaceful promises, but not without some diligent homework undertaken by the reader. I mean, nothing easy ever came to those just holding their hand out, did it?

About the Author - R. Melvin Keiser, Professor Emeritus of Religious and Interdisciplinary Studies, Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA, is a member of Swannanoa Valley Friends Meeting, and has been co-director with his wife, Beth, of the Quaker-based Common Light Meetingplace in the Asheville, North Carolina area. He lives in Black Mountain, NC.

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