Bøger af Dennis Patrick Slattery

2nd Edition: Previously published as "The Soul Does Not Specialize." This 2019 release contains a new preface by Dennis Patrick Slattery. An education in the Humanities is under attack, defunded and depreciated in academic institutions ranging from primary school through doctoral degree programs both in the United States and abroad. The emphasis is on educating students for standardized and specialized minds, at the expense of educating the whole student, which includes, as the title of this volume argues, schooling the soul. This collection brings together essays by administration, faculty, and staff from Pacifica Graduate Institute, a small educational institution located on the coast of Central California, which emphasizes the wisdom traditions in depth psychology, mythology, and the humanities. Each essay is a personal manifesto, an impassioned argument for the importance of an education in the humanities which stimulates the mind, nourishes the soul, and gives wings to the imagination.

In this 2019 reissued collection of eighteen essays, originally inspired by the soul-deadening mandates of the "No Child Left Behind" era, Dennis Patrick Slattery and Jennifer Leigh Selig bring together master teachers who have served in the classroom for fifteen or more years, spanning elementary, high school, undergraduate, graduate, and adult education across multiple disciplines, to share their reflections on reviving the soul of learning.While the essays are historically tethered to a moment in time, one that witnesses a crisis in learning, the intention of the volume is not merely to react and critique, but rather, to imagine the present as an occasion to revive, revision, and renew the enchantment of learning.One might ask: what timeless and perennial qualities of excellence are germane to teaching and learning as they both serve the life of the imagination and further the cultivation of the soul? The answer rests in the essays themselves, repositories of wisdom by teachers with decades of experience in the classroom, whose only mandate was to speak their own truths that have informed thousands of learners young and old.

A poem can massage us in the deepest recesses of our lives. It can call us both down into the realm of what is not visible at first glance, and through the sensate world we inhabit. These two directions form a cross, which is the crux of life itself.>This volume is a testament to the imagination, and to the possibilities which can be made to exist through fortunate word-arrangements when they are generous enough to come. Craig Deininger

Explores the wounded body in literature from Homer to Toni Morrison, examining how it functions archetypally as both a cultural metaphor and a poetic image.

In his 30th published volume, The Way of Myth: Stories'' Subtle Wisdom, Dennis Patrick Slattery reaches back in "Part I: Mining the Myths Anew," to some earlier essays on classic films and works of literature. He also includes extended meditations on the thought of mythologist Joseph Campbell; on creativity''s hungers; on beliefs as mythic constructs; and on the joys of painting. Many of the essays explore the act of reading and the importance of stories as they relate to one''s personal myth.In "Part II: The Social Fabric of Stories," Slattery includes a series of 19 short op-ed essays on a range of topics: the classroom as sacred space; uncertainty; the fact of myth; compassion; moral injury; peace; the gifts of conversation; gall-bladder surgery; the ''pan''-demic; and the poetics of myth, among others. Reflections on several of Joseph Campbell''s volumes are also included in this section.The author''s reflective interests are trans-disciplinary, analogical and depth-psychological. These essays stretch out over many years of writing. Now, in this volume they are gathered so they can speak and engage one another to reveal the subtle wisdom of stories."In The Way of Myth, the culminating book of the prolific Dennis Patrick Slattery''s career, I find an abundance of wonder and a plenitude of what the poet-astronomer Rebecca Elson called our ''responsibility to awe.'' For him, mythology is everywhere if only we develop "the mythic slant," the ability to see its wild wisdom all around us. What vitalizes his writing is how he encourages the reader to venture beyond theory to experience one of the least appreciated aspects of mythology-the sheer joy that can come from identifying with its characters-to the point where we no longer feel alone in our own struggles. The sheer range here of essays, poems, reminiscences, reviews and retellings underscores Slattery''s ardent belief that mythmaking is one of the constants in cultures throughout history. I especially value his uncanny awareness of what he calls the ''weathervanes of the soul,'' the cultural devices, if you will, found in art, literature, theater and cinema, as well as in sports, religion, psychiatry, nature and our romantic lives, which indicate the direction of our mythologically-inclined minds."~From the Foreword by Phil Cousineau