Do You Hear What I Hear?
An Unreligious Writer Investigates Religious Calling
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
At age thirty, Minna Proctor, a child of the seventies and product of divorced parents—Jewish mother, Catholic father, had no religious orientation. In fact, her last “spiritual” foray was her perfunctory bat mitzvah. So when her father wants to become an Episcopal priest, Minna Proctor is flummoxed. Brought up primarily by her mother in a household without any religious expression or guidance, Proctor was surprised to learn that her charming, intellectual father had a religious life, and what’s more, a higher calling. When he is summarily turned away, Proctor delves into the Byzantine discernment process that rejected her father from the priesthood—discovering, to her surprise, how insanely difficult it is to actually become a priest—and the pivotal role that calling plays in the evaluation, both historically and to this day. What unfolds is a remarkable intellectual pursuit—a young woman’s quest to understand religious and spiritual experience, her family, and the cultural context in which she was raised.
Based on lengthy conversations with her father, interviews with clergy and religious scholars, and readings of classic faith narratives from Augustine to Simone Weil, Do You Hear What I Hear? is a broad-minded and fascinating exploration of a very human phenomenon—the urge to know WHAT you are supposed to be doing with your life—in the light of cultural shifts over the last three decades, from one of the most talented young intellectuals writing today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Very few self-described "secular Jews" are confronted with the conundrum of a father who aspires to be a priest in the Episcopal Church. Fortunately, Proctor is a dogged and accomplished detective and an unobtrusive and appropriately revealing narrator. Raised mainly by her mother in a nonreligious household, she uses the occasion of her divorced father's revelations about his religious odyssey to explore the history, theology and politics of Christian vocation from the perspective of a nonbelieving daughter. In addition to allowing the reader into the richness of an ongoing dialogue with her father, Proctor offers wide-ranging research and interviews with participants in the process used in the Episcopal Church to discern whether candidates are called to ordained ministry. This is one of the book's real strengths, but it may pose a problem for readers who are more interested in the general topic of vocation than in specific denominational details. Near the beginning of this unique and often gripping chronicle, Proctor comments that she is compelled to "organize, ascribe and explain" her intellectual and emotional inner life. One senses throughout that she has, in this exhaustive process, found a way to reconcile the enigmas of an oft-absent father with her own search for answers to another deep riddle: the mystery of the cords that bind us into families.