Taking a Long Road Home

Description: This memoir invites readers to explore stages of their own spiritual journey. Bianchi graphically describes his path from an Italian immigrant family on the West Coast through twenty years as a Jesuit to being a professor of religious studies at Emory University. As he develops a more this-worldly inner life Bianchi struggles with church teachings about Christ sexuality and authority. He candidly reveals how failed marriages gave him a humbler grasp of meeting the transcendent in everyday problems. He embraces a contemplative spirituality that links Buddhist and Taoist practices with western mysticism. With a foot in Christianity he shows how to walk a way of inter-spirituality as a meaningful road for the contemporary seeker. For Bianchi this involves becoming a metaphorical Christian as he moves away from religious certitudes of early life to find spirit in nature and humanity. Bianchi a well-known writer on spiritual aging challenges Baby Boomers to craft a contemplative life that works for them today. With his wife and two cats he discovers a home for body and spirit along the banks of the Oconee River in Athens Georgia. Endorsements: Eugene Bianchis memoir will interest indeed fascinate anyone who has lived through the turbulent yet gripping religious transitioning of the last three-quarter century. He emerges as a successfully failed Jesuit and a sojourner in faith as in life. His Taking a Long Road Home is an outstanding example of beautifully sustained narrative headlong in parts erudite disarmingly truthful and humble deftly cumulative metaphoric sure and yet tentative. It deserves a quiet reading place beyond distractions. It will be a challenge to set aside before its finish. --Robert Brophy Professor of English Emeritus California State University Long Beach. Eugene Bianchis memoir displays a stunning humility--in the root sense of the word. Earthy and courageous it charts the journey of one mans search for (and discovery of) a fully embodied spirituality a search that leads him from his Italian-American roots through the Jesuits and several marriages to being finally at home. --Barbara DeConcini Executive Director of the American Academy of Religion 1991-2006 Bianchi writes with clarity candor and remarkable compassion. He speaks the truth as he has experienced it across a long life dedicated to spiritual and personal authenticity. The path he has followed from a rigid religiosity of abstract ideals to a calm acceptance of the presence of the divine in the ordinary stuff of human life is very much his own--yet it describes as well the stages through which many Catholics and Religious of his generation have passed. Here is a memoir that marks not only the moments of an individuals life but the momentous changes in a significant part of American culture over the past six decades. --Luke Timothy Johnson R. W. Woodruff Professor New Testament Studies Emory University Eugene Bianchis memoir of a long life in and around American Catholicism is an eloquent testimony to his ongoing search for spiritual completeness. From his days as a Jesuit to years of searching for love and fulfillment to the quieter and perhaps deeper questions that have come with length of years Bianchi offers an inspiring and often moving account of how a human life and a religious tradition are interwoven in ways both challenging and consoling. --Paul Lakeland Aloysius P. Kelley SJ Professor of Catholic Studies Fairfield University The candid log of a turbulent voyage from sky-bound religious institutions to an earth-based ecumenism. A former Jesuit priest and advocate of reform in clerical ministry (especially regarding celibacy) Eugene Bianchi narrates stages of his search for faith grounded in awareness of love and grace in the here and now. Written both for the critical theologian and the person on the street the book provides opportunities for discussion hear