Simone Weil: A Modern Pilgrimage - Softcover

Coles, Dr. Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1683362977 ISBN 13: 9781683362975

Publisher: SkyLight Paths, 2001

Synopsis

A brilliant portrait of a beloved and controversial
figure in twentieth-century spirituality.

Simone Weil (1906-1943) was a writer and philosopher who devoted her life to a search for God―while avoiding membership in organized religion. She wrote with the clarity of a brilliant mind educated in the best French schools, the social conscience of a grass-roots labor organizer, and the certainty and humility of a mystic―and she persistently carried out her search in the company of the poor and oppressed.

Robert Coles's study of this strange and compelling figure includes the details of her short, eventful life: her academic career, her teaching, her political and social activism, and her mystical experiences. Coles also analyzes the major themes her life encompassed: her politics, her Jewish identity, her moral concerns, her intellect, and her experience of grace. This is the best, most accessible introduction to the woman who was a spiritual influence on the life and work of so many, among them T. S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, Adrienne Rich, and Albert Camus.

Robert Coles, M.D., was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his five-volume Children of Crisis series. He is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard Medical School and the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University, and is the author of many books, including The Spiritual Life of Children, The Moral Life of Children, and Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion.

About this title

About the Author:

Dr. Robert Coles was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his five-volume Children of Crisis series. He is professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard Medical School and James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University. Winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our highest civilian honor, he is also the author of many books.

Review:

"Coles takes up certain themes and passions that preoccupied his subjects, and wrestles with them as one might do with those of any figure who has become a lifelong spiritual companion.... To Dr. Coles, irony and paradox are the very conditions of life, and in Weil he finds much to try to explain. Straight off he confronts her probable suicide and links it with her lifelong aspiration to the condition of hunger, not only as a way of sharing the deprivations of those who suffer, but as a spiritual condition of those who, as she puts it, are `waiting for God.'" -- New York Times Book Review

"The legendary Weil--part saint, part literary genius, part patriot, part mystic--was an intellectual who believed that one must put one's body on the line. In her case, her body was frail, but her will was indomitable. Coles's conversations with Anna Freud about [Simone Weil] are luminous points in a book already filled with passion and light." -- Kirkus Reviews

About this edition

• Publisher: SkyLight Paths
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1683362977
• ISBN 13: 9781683362975
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208