Enduring Lives: Portraits of Women and Faith in Action [Hardcover]

Carol Flinders (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 18, 2006

In Enduring Lives, the sister volume to her bestselling classic Enduring Grace, Carol Lee Flinders draws riveting portraits of women who are the spiritual great-granddaughters of the female mystics and saints profiled in Enduring Grace. Tracing the spiritual "mother line" of these holy women of centuries past-Julian of Norwich, Saint Catherine of Siena, and Saint Catherine of Genoa-to contemporary women whose lives have been lived with a similar passion for and dedication to improving the human condition, Flinders explores the spiritual journeys of:

- Jane Goodall, a world-renowned scientist, environmentalist, and humanitarian, whose groundbreaking work runs parallel to a deeply realized spiritual vision for our times.
- Etty Hillesum, a Jewish intellectual in Amsterdam who documented in her diaries an abiding vision for the eventual triumph of human good over evil, even as she faced the horror of Auschwitz.
- Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun who befriended death-row inmates and accompanied them to their ends with the grace of her certainty that "God dwells in the people that we most want to throw away." (Sister Helen Prejean was portrayed by Susan Sarandon in the Oscar-winning film Dead Man Walking.)
- Tenzin Palmo, a Tibetan Buddhist nun, whose twelve years of meditation in a Himalayan cave led her to emerge with a road map for ending human suffering.

With these fascinating profiles of four contemporary women of faith, Carol Flinders illuminates the heart of the feminine sacred and provides inspiration for female spiritual seekers everywhere.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

In this companion volume to her best-selling Enduring Grace, Flinders profiles the lives of four contemporary women of faith. Contending that her modern subjects are the spiritual heirs to saints and mystics such as Saint Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, and St. Clare, she draw parallels between her modern subjects and their historical predecessors. Tracing the evolution of what she terms the "mother line" through the centuries, she uncovers an unbroken line of succession linking the holy women of the past and the present. Fascinating enough to stand on their own, the individual stories of death-row-activist Sister Helen Prejean, primatologist and environmentalist Jane Goodall, Holocaust victim Etty Hillesum, and Tibetan Buddhist nun Tensin Palmo serve as a collective inspirational tribute to the sacred feminine. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Author of Enduring Grace and coauthor of the legendary vegetarian cookbook Laurel's Kitchen, Carol Lee Flinders lives in Northern California.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Tarcher; annotated edition edition (May 18, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 158542496X
• ISBN-13: 978-1585424962
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,132,703 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Carol Lee Flinders received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, specializing in medieval studies. She then spent fifteen years writing about natural foods, co-authoring the popular Laurel's Kitchen cookbooks and writing a weekly syndicated newspaper column.

In 1990 Carol returned to her field of study and wrote Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics. Subsequent books include At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst, Rebalancing the World, and Enduring Lives. She has taught courses in mystical literature at UC, Berkeley, and at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Carol is a Fellow of the Spirituality and Health Institute, Santa Clara University, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the REVEAL conference. She is currently adjunct faculty at the Sophia Center in Culture and Spirituality, Holy Names University, Oakland, CA, where she teaches courses on mysticism and contemplative spirituality.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Passion for Life, November 25, 2006

By 

C. MACELROY (Marin, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enduring Lives: Portraits of Women and Faith in Action (Hardcover)

What an intriguing title! Is this book about immortality? The cover of Enduring Lives intimates a book about Catholicism. But it would be a mistake to catalog this book under Religion. Enduring Lives belongs more with Women's Studies, an evolving discipline in which Carol Lee Flinders breaks new ground.

Speaking generally, men are not keen readers of Women's Studies. However, if they can overcome this disinclination, in this book they will uncover a new perspective on women's sexuality and social organization. For, who best to understand the role sex hormones play on a woman's psyche than those who are denied a sexual partner, either involuntarily or by intent? The question may be: How are biological impulses transmuted into a socially acceptable existence? Scientists often look at aberrations to discover the boundaries of what we assume is the norm. In Enduring Lives we look at some of these boundaries.

There is much to be learned from this well written, edited, and designed book. On the surface, Enduring Lives is a set of distilled biographies of four women who, at first glance, have nothing in common; not in the times they lived, the location, not their religious upbringing, nor in their contribution to our society. Only a scholar with the knowledge of Carol Lee Flinders could weave the biographies of a concentration camp victim, a Ph.D. from Cambridge who studied the Chimpanzee, a recluse from Tibet who started life in war-torn London, and a woman whose work was featured in the movie Dead Man Walking, into an exciting, cohesive account of the amazing evolution of human spirit. The author is informed by her own scholarship, a well argued (non-defamatory) critique of Catholicism, and most of all by a deep understanding of how spirit allows us to survive in a troubled world that seems increasingly to deny opportunity for our very existence

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written crash course in practical mysticism, March 25, 2009

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Lisa Francesca (Silicon Valley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enduring Lives: Portraits of Women and Faith in Action (Hardcover)

I loved reading this book. Flinders has a long history of sitting quietly and writing, and her style is simple, thoughtful, and personal. Chapter by chapter, she led me through the lives of four modern women -- lives that were and are very different from mine, yet easily accessible through the writing, and immediately important to issues that face us today. Though the religious traditions of each woman are radically different, enough practical suggestions can be gleaned to make this a remarkable handbook for the modern mystic.

I was nervous to read the fourth section because it had to do with the death penalty. I was afraid it might upset me. I closed the book and thought about Flinders' history as an author. She co-wrote Laurel's Kitchen, the intro of which I'd read many times. She wrote the wonderful "At the Root of This Longing," and the poetic "Enduring Grace." Winners all-- could I not trust her by now? Taking a breath, I entered the world of Sister Helen Prejean -- and it was an amazing, inspiring chapter that still remains with me.

5.0 out of 5 stars enduring lives, February 22, 2010

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Mary K. Delurgio "seeking reality" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Enduring Lives: Portraits of Women and Faith in Action (Hardcover)

Flinders has beautifully described the unique inner experiences of each of these remarkable and very special women .... i have unederlined passages in my book so that I can go back and use them for daily contemplation.