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My Grandfather's House: A Genealogy of Doubt and Faith - Inspirational Family History Book for Ancestry Research & Spiritual Reflection
My Grandfather's House: A Genealogy of Doubt and Faith - Inspirational Family History Book for Ancestry Research & Spiritual Reflection

My Grandfather's House: A Genealogy of Doubt and Faith - Inspirational Family History Book for Ancestry Research & Spiritual Reflection

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Description

A history of faith, doubt, and religious belief told through five centuries in the lives of one remarkable family, by the award winning author of In the Deep Midwinter and Mr. White's ConfessionRobert Clark traces the spiritual quests and struggles of his ancestors, from England's split with the Church of Rome at the end of the middle ages his own return to the faith five hundred years later. Clark reconstructs their lives as medieval Catholics, heretics, and inquisitors in the England of Henry VII; as Puritan settlers, participants in Indian wars, and accusers in witch trials in New England in the 1600s; as preachers, artists, writers, and agnostics during the thelolgical and intellectual upheavals of the 19th century that left them exploring creeds ranging from evangelical Protestantism to Unitarianism to Buddhism to atheism. In the context of King Henry's divorces and his quarrel with both the Pope and Martin Luther; the firery preaching of Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather; the religious and personal struggles of Emerson Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Margaret Fuller, Clark weaves a rich history that culminates in his own quest through doubt toward faith. My Grandfather's House is a profound, passionate book that will speak to readers of Karen Armstrong and Kathleen Norris.

Reviews

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- Verified Buyer
A man with a historian's soul wrote this book, going even beyond the Harvard professor/host of "Finding Your Roots" on PBS-TV who guides celebrities on their genealogical quests. Robert Clark's quest is about his family history of faith and doubt, rather than about DNA. Yet it poses questions that most of us might ask at some time in our lives.Like many Americans, 500 years ago, all of Clark's ancestors were Roman Catholic. During the reign of Henry VIII, they became Protestant, presumably Anglican. By 350 years ago, his ancestors immigrated and became "all kinds of Protestants and atheist" Americans. Then, two weeks before his own baby was baptized Catholic, Clark was "taken back" into the Catholic Church. The statements he makes about his own journey may be entirely subjective, or may be fairly common. For instance:"Committed atheists who with perfect untroubled assurance believe or want to believe in something beyond quotidian reality are rare.""For most people, disbelief is neither an idea or conviction but an unresolved question, unmet aspiration, a fulfillment unable to bring about or even imagine.""Faith has more to do with the imagination, with how we see and what we can envision, than in reason or will."From such an imagination, Clark found a "disposition toward God and a sense of God's disposition towards us." Then, he rethought what kind of person he was, and contemplated whether he was loved by a Holy Spirit for or in spite of himself.Whether his journey was common or unique, I don't know. But the questions he poses make fascinating reading to those intrigued with the ties of faith to skepticism, and why and how one comes to embrace belief in a Holy Spirit from a stance totally alienated to such a change of heart and mind.