In conversation with Tillich, Coles found he distinguished between “Man the Thinking Materialist and Man the anxiously aspiring creature who bows his head and prays, and who ‘looks outside himself to Another, to God,’ for explanations, understanding, guidance.” Dorothy Day expressed a similar thought: “Thank God for this wonderful secular life - but thank God for giving us a mind that can turn to Him, to ask ‘why’ and ‘wherefore’ as well as spend itself to exhaustion getting things done!” In line with these, his mentors, Coles sets out to explore the two minds - secular thinking as well as the constant moral and spiritual search for meaning. The book is a short discourse on how secular culture, science, and “secular mind” (a term used by Tillich) have come to dominate Western society.
Inspiration for the current volume came from Dorothy Day and Paul Tillich, to whom the book is dedicated.
A Pulitzer Prize winner for his work with Children of Crisis, Coles is a research psychiatrist for Harvard University Health Services and Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard Medical School and the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics. In more than fifty books, Robert Coles has written extensively about these authors and many others. Erikson, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy might be high on the list. It would be interesting to ask Collegium alumni/ae for their nominations of authors who should be on a recommended reading list for the rest of us.
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