An American Gospel

Download or read book An American Gospel written by Erik Reece and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-04-02 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning author of Lost Mountain, a stirring work of memoir, spiritual journey, and historical inquiry. At the age of thirty-three, Erik Reece's father, a Baptist minister, took his own life, leaving Erik in the care of his grandmother and his grandfather-also a fundamentalist Baptist preacher, and a pillar of his rural Virginia community. While Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he unexpectedly found comfort in the Jefferson Bible. Inspired by the text, he undertook what would become a spiritual and literary quest to identify an "American gospel" coursing through the work of both great and forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt Whitman to William James to Lynn Margulis. The result of Reece's journey is a deeply intimate, stirring book about personal, political, and historical demons-and the geniuses we must call upon to combat them.