Nearer, My God
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
His Roman-Catholic faith has been an enduring part of the life and personality of William Buckley, Jr. Now, for the first time since his ground breaking God and the Man at Yale he has written a book about faith--his own.
Nearer, My God, An Autobiography of Faith is William Buckley's superbly written story of his life seen through his abiding love for the Catholic Church, a love instilled in him from childhood. He reminisces about his school days in England, his family, the affect the Lunn/Knox dialogue had on him, and examines many aspects of Catholicism and its theology, doctrine and liturgy and on the way discourses about Lourdes, the vernacular mass, the Church and the State, the Crucifixion, the priesthood, contraception as well as the many people who have assisted him on his life's journey. A remarkable, revealing book about one man and his faith.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Buckley's account of a 1930s and '40s Catholic childhood spent at English boarding school--and of a family life spent traveling Europe, living in huge homes peopled with butlers and beloved tutors--will not whistle up similar memories for most Catholics of his, or any other, generation. Though the book includes autobiographical sections, this is less an autobiography than a collection of the author's opinions about things Catholic. Buckley and several prominent Catholic converts he consulted give the reader an informative and entertaining earful on everything from post-Vatican II liturgy--which Buckley finds aesthetically and theologically inferior to the old Latin Mass--to such current Catholic hot-button issues as the ordination of women and the use of contraceptives. An appendix presents a summary of the status of religious observances at a number of exclusive private secondary schools. This is a book by an author who eschews the merely trendy and speaks his own mind.