The Inside Story: A Narrative Approach to Religious Understanding and Truth

By Paul Brockelman

This book explores what is meant by claims of religious understanding and truth. It argues that at the end of the twentieth century we are undergoing a revolution in our thinking about ourselves and our place in nature, and that the worldview pervading modern culture is dissolving because it has marginalized and hindered authentic religious understanding and practice. It has spiritually degraded and destroyed the natural environment upon which it depends.

The book describes how this situation developed, and proposes an alternative postmodern, narrative concept of religious understanding that may help us to transcend these spiritual and ecological problems. This model of religious truth explores a new cosmological story that has emerged over the past twenty-five years. It is a story that will enrich and deepen our spiritual experience while helping us cope with possibly the most disastrous and dangerous consequence of modernity--the present worldwide ecological crisis.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0791410196
• ISBN13: 9780791410196
• Release Date: August 1992
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Length: 204 Pages

Customer Reviews

The Myth of Modernity

"Reality is our sacred text . . . there are no obvious foundations,no simple solutions; there is only ambiguity and risk and bright-eyed wonder at the whole, astonishing affair." It is unfortunate that people so misunderstand the word "Myth": It does not mean "fiction," though idiomatically this is what it is understood to signify. Rather, at its most general level of meaning, Myth is synonymous with "story," and as such does not pretend to classify itself into genre. It is, in fact, a sort of genre unto itself. Paul Brockelman is a wonderful person, an accomplished scholar, and a compassionate, generous, veteran teacher. It has been my pleasure to take a number of his courses, and on my own, read a number of his books. "The Inside Story" is representative of the quality of prose and thought that Brockelman is capable of, and is a joy to read. It offers insight into life and religion, into so-called "truth" and reality, all in the context of individual experience. The problem, as Brockelman sees it, is the question of how to interpret (construct) meaning from the multifarious confusions and conflictions of our modern lives. How do we find spiritual significance in the cultural malaise of the 21st century? Perhaps readers will be disapointed that Brockelman gives us no real answers (or at least no obvious and quick-fix solutions), but an understanding reader will appreciate how he frames the questions, and will benefit from an open-minded reading of this fine book. It might even, perhaps, help guide those who feel particularly ambivalent in their lives and time, helping to lead us in fruitful directions of thought and action. BWH Oakland, California