The Discipline of the Mountain: Dante's Purgatorio in a Nuclear World (Daniel Berrigan Reprint)

In The Discipline of the Mountain Daniel Berrigan offers ways of imagining our plight through the poetic vision of Dantes Purgatorio. There can be found a faithful vision an alternative a truthful image of God of ourselves of history. Berrigan employs free poetic adaptation of the original--its themes moods discourses encounters--with a prose commentary relating the text to political-moral issues of the present day. With its themes of lust and hatred religious strife and ecclesiastical corruption military power and oppression the Purgatorio is an apt allegory of modern society. Thirteenth-century kings and princes shade into twentieth-century colonels and shahs and juntas. The Discipline of the Mountain is evocatively illustrated by Robert F. McGovern. What is God saying to us what would he have us do as a seemingly irreversible course leads humanity like a blindfolded beast towards the abattoir? Might there be ways of coping ways which might properly be named spiritual surpassing whatever the politics of the Left or Right might offer? --from the Introduction Let us hope that our country will become wise. But until it does---indeed in order that it should---we as its citizens must act on the wisdom of our own conscience. That to me is the ultimate meaning of what Father Daniel Berrigan in prose and poetry says and leaves unsaid. -- Howard Zinn Daniel Berrigan is a poet and prophet for these times. --Jim Wallis editor of Sojourners magazine Daniel Berrigan is an internationally known voice for peace and disarmament. A Jesuit priest award-winning poet and the author of over fifty books he has spoken for peace justice and nuclear disarmament for nearly fifty years. He spent several years in prison for his part in the 1968 Catonsville Nine antiwar action and later acted with the Plowshares Eight. Nominated many times for the Nobel Peace Prize he lives and works in New York City. Robert F. McGovern whose woodcuts appear in The Discipline of the Mountain is Professor Emeritus at Philadelphia College of Art and lives in Narbeth Pennsylvania. In addition to illustrating several books his work has appeared in New Covenant Magazine and the Catholic Worker.