Working on God

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Spirituality: Just Do It : Part 1
Millions of Americans are finding it more and more difficult to apply the traditional demands of organized religion to their lives, and yet a complete absence of spirituality leaves them uneasy.

Chapter 1: Spirituality: Just Do It : Part 2
During the afternoon work period, I invoke journalistic license to break the sesshin silence and talk with Helen, an energetic seventy-three-year-old. The retired director of a school for disturbed and disabled children

Chapter 1: Spirituality: Just Do It : Part 3
One night, just as I congratulate myself on finally getting the hang of this alien business, I pour tea all over my place mat. A server silently hands me a napkin that's folded into her belt for just such emergencies.

Millions of Americans are finding it more and more difficult to apply the traditional demands of organized religion to their lives, and yet a complete absence of spirituality leaves them uneasy. Working on God is a book for and about such intelligent, independent people, who are seeking to reconcile their spiritual yearnings with their skeptical intellects. Winifred Gallagher, a behavioral-science reporter, began her investigation of religion in our postmodern age with research and interviews and soon discovered a vast, quiet revolution under way among ordinary men and women grappling with the sacred. Both Gallagher's brilliant journalistic inquiry and her very personal journey unfold over time spent in a Zen monastery and a cloistered convent, in small-group discussions and healing rituals, in a Conservative synagogue that shares spaces with a Christian church, and in the birthplace of the New Age. Written with humor, empathy, and a rigorous curiosity, Working on God breaks new ground in depicting the broad-based spiritual movement that is transforming many lives.

Winifred Gallagher's previous books are Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Create the Individual, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. She has written for many magazines, from The Atlantic Monthly to Rolling Stone. She lives in Manhattan and Long Eddy, New York.

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