TEN YEARS AGO, Harvard professor James Kugel was diagnosed with an
aggressive, likely fatal, form of cancer. "I was, of course,
disturbed and worried. But the main change in my state of mind was
that the background music had suddenly stopped--the music of daily
life that's constantly going, the music of infinite time and
possibilities. Now suddenly it was gone, replaced by "nothing,
"just silence. There you are, one little person, sitting in the
late summer sun, with only a few things left to do."
Despite his illness, Kugel was intrigued by this new state of mind
and especially the uncanny feeling of human smallness that came
with it. There seemed to be something overwhelmingly "true "about
it--and its starkness reminded him of certain themes and motifs he
had encountered in his years of studying ancient religions. "This,
I remember thinking, was something I should really look into
further--if ever I got the chance."
"In the Valley of the Shadow "is the result of that search. In this
wide-ranging exploration of different aspects of
religion--interspersed with his personal reflections on the course
of his own illness--Kugel seeks to uncover what he calls "the
starting point of religious consciousness," an ancient "sense of
self" and a way of fitting into the world that is quite at odds
with the usual one. He tracks these down in accounts written long
ago of human meetings with gods and angels, anthropologists'
descriptions of the lives of hunter-gatherers, the role of
witchcraft in African societies, first-person narratives of
religious conversions, as well as the experimental data assembled
by contemporary neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists.
Though this different sense of how we fit into the world has
largely disappeared from our own societies, it can still come back
to us as a fleeting state of mind, "when you are just sitting on
some park bench somewhere; or at a wedding, while everyone else is
dancing and jumping around; or else one day standing in your
backyard, as the sun streams down through the trees . . . "
Experienced in its fullness, this different way of seeing opens
onto a stark, new landscape ordinarily hidden from human eyes.
Kugel's look at the whole phenomenon of religious beliefs is a
rigorously honest, sometimes skeptical, but ultimately deeply
moving affirmation of faith in God. One of our generation's leading
biblical scholars has created a powerful meditation on humanity's
place in the world and all that matters most in our lives.
Believers and doubters alike will be struck by its combination of
objective scholarship and poetic insight, which makes for a single,
beautifully crafted consideration of life's greatest mystery.
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