seekers notes hidden mystery invoke anomalies

In contrast, most editions of Thomas Merton’s famous account of Trappist life, The Seven Storey Mountain, run to more than 400 pages. For one thing, Dunne recounts his “spiritual odyssey” in only seventy-nine pages. In other ways, notably its brevity and in the manner in which the author maintains a strict division between his inner life and his life in the world, Dunne’s modest little book stands apart from virtually all contemporary works in the genre 2.

In many ways, Road to Silence fulfils most readers’ expectations of a spiritual autobiography, a genre that has also attracted a considerable level of critical attention in recent decades 1. This article considers the second of these autobiographies. Three years later, he published The Road to Silence: An Irish Spiritual Odyssey.

Before he died so prematurely, he had published In My Father’s House in 1991, which is a straightforward account of growing up in a working-class family in the housing estates of Waterford. Recent memo (.)ĢDunne also wrote two autobiographies, and he wrote them when young.

2 Spiritual autobiography is no longer “ghettoized” in religious publishing houses.

Leigh, Circuitous Journeys: Modern Spiritual Autobiography, New York, (.)

Seekers notes hidden mystery invoke anomalies