Until recently, discernment has not been a high priority among Catholics. We have lived off rules of thumb in doctrine and practice, preferring assembly line religion to a personal and custom-made response to God from deep within our own lives. Contemplation and personal discernment are recognized today as normal developments in the spiritual life. Contemplation and discernment deal directly with the mysterious, incomprehensible God who appears among us and is experienced in himself (in contemplation) or in a given human situation (in discernment). Discernment asks us to be contempla­tives in action, in our human choices, finding the same God outside whom we discover in silent prayer. The challenge of identifying that Presence in such a way as to interpret the course of action we should take is a formidable one. This book begins a theology of discernment by reviewing the traditional theory that has come down to us from Scripture and the Fathers of the Desert. Seeing this body of teaching in its simplest lines, using the form as presented to us by Ignatius of Loyola, will provide a framework in which to critique the process in the light of present perspectives.

Experiencing God's love through silent prayer.

A natural history rich in observation of the animal world and how humans participate in it, Silent Thunder is also a passionate story of scientist Katy Payne’s spiritual quest as she turns a keen eye on her role in this world. Starting with the story of her revolutionary discovery that elephants use infrasonic sounds—sounds below the range of human hearing—to communicate, Payne shares what she learned from her fascinating field research in Africa, research that reveals new insights into elephants’ social lives. When five of the elephant families she studies are the victims of culling, Payne’s approach to her research changes, as she fights valiantly to protect the elephants. The result of her research, and the touching insights gained from Africans she worked with and the elephants she studied, give a vivid impression of Payne’s view from the front lines of the natural preservation effort. Like Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard and the writings of Jane Goodall, Silent Thunder demonstrates how a commitment to all life can bring one’s own into a new focus.

In the visionary tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, One Square Inch of Silence alerts us to beauty that we take for granted and sounds an urgent environmental alarm. Natural silence is our nation’s fastest-disappearing resource, warns Emmy-winning acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, who has made it his mission to record and preserve it in all its variety—before these soul-soothing terrestrial soundscapes vanish completely in the ever-rising din of man-made noise. Recalling the great works on nature written by John Muir, John McPhee, and Peter Matthiessen, this beautifully written narrative, co-authored with John Grossmann, is also a quintessentially American story—a road trip across the continent from west to east in a 1964 VW bus. But no one has crossed America like this. Armed with his recording equipment and a decibel-measuring sound-level meter, Hempton bends an inquisitive and loving ear to the varied natural voices of the American landscape—bugling elk, trilling thrushes, and drumming, endangered prairie chickens. He is an equally patient and perceptive listener when talking with people he meets on his journey about the importance of quiet in their lives. By the time he reaches his destination, Washington, D.C., where he meets with federal officials to press his case for natural silence preservation, Hempton has produced a historic and unforgettable sonic record of America. With the incisiveness of Jack Kerouac’s observations on the road and the stirring wisdom of Robert Pirsig repairing an aging vehicle and his life, One Square Inch of Silence provides a moving call to action. More than simply a book, it is an actual place, too, located in one of America’s last naturally quiet places, in Olympic National Park in Washington State.

MacKendrick (philosophy, Le Moyne College) explores language and silence and their temporality and atemporality through works of philosophy, literature, and religion, where eternity and silence have long been matters of concern. Among the authors she considers are Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, four poets, St. Augustine, and Meister Eckhart. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR