Search results for ""Author Jennifer Michael Hecht""

Religion once formed the rhythms and structures of society: marking time with calendars, carving out space for contemplation, creating connection, reinforcing legacy and morality. Now, for many, religion no longer runs the show. So where shall we find our magic? How do we celebrate milestones? Which texts can focus our attention but still offer space for inquiry, communion, and the chance to dwell for a dazzling instant in what can't be said? The answer, Jennifer Michael Hecht--the historian, poet, and bestselling author of Doubt--tells us, is poetry. In twenty chapters built from years of questions and conversation with those looking for an authentic and meaningful life, Hecht offers ways to excavate the useful aspects of tradition and to replace what no longer feels true. Through cultures and poetic wisdom from around the world-Sappho, Rumi, Shakespeare, Issa, Tagore, Frost, Szymborska, Angelou, and others-she blends literary criticism with spiritual guidance rooted in the everyday. Linking our needs to particular poems, she helps us better understand those needs, ourselves, and poetry. Our capacity for wonder is one of the greatest joys of being human; The Wonder Paradox celebrates that instinct and that yearning. Like Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, it promises to inspire generations of readers.

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A leading public critic reminds us of the compelling reasons people throughout time have found to stay alive Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our “secular age” in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment’s insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.

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