Religion Press Release Services

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Kelly Hughes
kelly@dechanthughes.com
312-280-8126

Ruth Weiner
ruth@sevenstories.com
212-226-8760

“This is a feast of ideas and insights, a banquet of hard-won wisdom to which you can return time and again when your heart yearns for inspiration and your intellect for illumination.”
—Bill Moyers

“This is a rich feast of accumulated wisdom.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

The Life of Meaning
REFLECTIONS ON FAITH, DOUBT, AND REPAIRING THE WORLD

Bob Abernethy and William Bole
And the contributors to PBS’
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly


“This rich, meaningful book is, literally, an answer to your prayers or, if you prefer, a fascinating journey through the labyrinth of questions we all have about life, faith, God, choices and doubts…. Bob Abernethy and William Bole have done us all a great favor with this collection….”
—Tom Brokaw, from the Foreword


Extraordinary people will say extraordinary things, especially when it is Bob Abernethy and his team at PBS’s Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly doing the asking. The Life of Meaning (Seven Stories Press, April 28, 2007) presents 59 extraordinary contributors speaking candidly about their search for meaning in their own personal lives, their experience of God, and for some, the struggle to reconcile faith and doubt. They include Jimmy Carter, Francis Collins, The Dalai Lama, Robert Franklin, Irving Greenberg, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Harold Kushner, Anne Lamott, Madeleine L’Engle, Thomas Lynch, Martin Marty, Mark Noll, Rachel Remen, Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Brown Taylor, Studs Terkel, Thich Nhat Hanh, Phyllis Tickle, Desmond Tutu, Jean Vanier, Marianne Williamson and many others.

Be it Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s simple description of a presence like a warm fire, or Reverend William Sloane Coffin affirming that “the glory of God [is] a human being fully alive,” whether it is Eileen Durkin’s view that “grace is everywhere,” or Rabbi Irving Greenberg seeking a system of belief that can withstand the violence of the contemporary world, the voices in The Life of Meaning describe the ways in which individual leaps of faith can repair the world—and ourselves.

Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, which Bob Abernethy conceived for PBS in 1997 and anchors, has been described as “the best spot on the television landscape to take in the broad view of the spiritual dimension of American life . . .” by the Christian Science Monitor. “Finally,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle, “something intelligent on TV about religion.” In The Life of Meaning, the core ideas of the program are collected for the first time in book form.

Before launching the series, Bob Abernethy served as a correspondent for NBC News for more than four decades, reporting from Washington, Los Angeles, London, and Moscow. He lives in Washington, D.C. William Bole’s articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Commonweal magazine. A research fellow of the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University and an editorial consultant at Boston College, he lives in Andover, Massachusetts.


The Life of Meaning
Reflections on Faith, Doubt, and Repairing the World
Seven Stories Press
April 28, 2007
$29.95 / Hardcover / 6.75 X 9.25
ISBN-13: 978-1-58322-758-9

For further information, contact:

Kelly Hughes, 312-280-8126 or kelly@dechanthughes.com
Ruth Weiner, 212-226-8760 or ruth@sevenstories.com




Praise for The Life of Meaning:


“A noted theologian (Paul Tillich) has said that religion is a search for the truth about our relationship with God and our fellow human beings. This book will help us in that search."
—Jimmy Carter


“Some books—almost all books, in fact—are for reading. Only occasionally is there that stately book which is so substantial and yet so open and present, that it is for being with. This is a book for being with.... The Life of Meaning is more infused with wisdom than any I have seen in many, many a year."
—Phyllis Tickle


“Many of us have been commenting much about a spiritual hunger at work beyond the walls of organized religion. In assembling these probing reflections on life and meaning Bob Abernethy and William Bole have prepared a marvelous feast for the hungry.”
—Richard J. Mouw, President, Fuller Theological Seminary


“If you want to know how a wide and divergent array of thoughtful Americans understand and practice their religious faith, no other one book can tell you more than this collection of honest and often powerfully moving reflections.”
—Peter Steinfels, Co-director, Fordham Center on Religion and Culture and religion columnist for the New York Times

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