Pure Love, Pure Poetry, Pure Prayer: The Life and Work of Henri Bremond

By the time of his death in 1933 Henri Bremond, priest and member of the elite Academie francaise, had established himself in France, and increasingly in England and the United States, as a distinguished historian of Christian spirituality and as a Catholic modernist who helped to shake the church out of its dogmatic slumbers by embracing "pure love," artistic-poetic expression, and mystical prayer as the privileged manifestations of spiritual truth. Drawing on substantial new scholarship in France, that has resuscitated and reinterpreted Bremond's work for our own times, and that sees Bremond as an important precursor of current trends in literary interpretation as well as spirituality, Gorday surveys the entirety of Bremond's corpus of writing, setting his work in its context of his personal struggles, as well as the wider setting of French historical and cultural development.

Peter J. Gorday is a retired Episcopal priest, parish pastor, and marriage and family therapist in Georgia. With a PhD in Religion (Vanderbilt), and ThM in Pastoral Counseling (Columbia Presbyterian), he has authored studies in the history of Biblical Interpretation and the relations of theology and psychoanalysis, as well as a biography of François Fénelon (2012).