Meaning of Lives - Biography, Autobiography and the Spiritual Quest (Paperback, New ed)

An examination of how the process of reading and writing other people's lives implicates readers and authors in what is ultimately an endeavour of autobiographical introspection and reflection. It starts from the assumption that the use of writing and reading about individual lives in recent scholarship in religion and the human sciences - not to mention in the field of literary biography - has greatly revived interest in the personal, concrete and meaningful side of the study of world religions. The author traces the writings of the most important contributors to the genre, including William James, Erik Erikson, Martin Buber, Henry Murray, Gamaliel Bradford and many others, and shows how their biographical methods influenced their conclusions about the nature of religious experience.