A01=David Dickinson
Author_David Dickinson
Category=DS
Category=QR
Category=QRM
Category=QRVK
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eq_biography-true-stories
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Reading as if for Life
Product details
- ISBN 9780718898175
- Publication Date: 24 Apr 2025
- Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Creaking open the pages of a heavy hardback, or bending the spine of a poetry book over your knee on the train; squinting over curled-up pages by the light of a candle, or scribbling notes in the margins in the corner of a sprawling library. There are many who read as if for life; many for whom, as David Dickinson explores, reading does not just feed the mind but also the soul.
Reading as if for Life takes us beyond the spirituality of sacred texts, and into the spiritual possibilities of 'secular' literature: the opportunity to find or empty oneself, the chance to engage in silent conversation with an absent other, the appreciation of beauty and art, the possibility of enlightenment. From Augustine of Hippo to Thomas Hardy, Iris Murdoch, the poetry of R.S. Thomas, Duffy and Donne, and many other literary works, David Dickinson explores how writers throughout the centuries have understood and experienced their own spirituality of reading. For Dickinson, these myriad journeys all bring us closer to an encounter with God, dreaming ourselves into a world beyond. This book invites its readers to see reading as a valuable spiritual exercise.
David Dickinson is a retired Methodist Minister and an avid reader. He has researched and written in the field of literature and theology since the early 1990s and ministered in churches from the late 1980s until 2023. Another work of Dickinson's published by The Lutterworth Press is Make-Believe: God in 21st Century Novels (2020).
