Customer Reviews

The Flowering of Mysticism (Presence of God)

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This is a great book! The author is the same person who wrote the Foundations of Mysticism and the Growth of Mysticism. The subject of mysticism tends to produce a lot of mediocre writing--many people think that as long as they are spiritual people, they naturally understand what every other mystic is writing about and they can just write whatever comes to their mind, without any attention to detail or history. McGinn's approach is more historical and scholarly--he treats each mystic as a distinctive person with his/her own message and special gifts. But he also manages to give a sense of the spirit that unites them all. There really is no other book of its kind out there. It's a book that can be read for inspiration and for scholarly insight. I enjoyed it so much I read it straight through, but if you don't want to read it from cover to cover, you can also use it as a wonderful reference work--I recommend it to my students all the time as a way for them to get a completely reliable picture of important figures in the field, in an interesting and readable way. In short, no matter who you are, you'll love this book.