The Art of Confession: Renewing Yourself Through the Practice of Honesty

by Paul Wilkes

Overview

Paul Wilkes has written an elegant, prescriptive, secular book—a spiritual gem—that reinvents the power of confession for a contemporary audience. Confession is the foundation of religion, the essence of mental health. It is listening to the voice within to follow the path to honest and conscious living. And for thousands of years people have used the power of confession to find their best selves.

Liberating confession from the confessional, The Art of Confession draws on traditions as old as ancient Greece and as modern as psychoanalysis as diverse as Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam, to show readers how to incorporate a confessional practice into their daily lives. There are visualizations, spiritual exercises, prompts, and meditations; private confessions, direct confessions, psychological confessions.

Accompanied throughout by a wise “confessional chorus”—a rabbi, a priest, a psychiatrist, a nun, whose points-of-view complement and augment the text—The Art of Confession is an antidote to our age of oversharing, where we happily broadcast the minutest details of our lives in public, yet never find the time to discover the risk, relief, and ultimately the renewal that real, considered self-reflection offers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761155966
Publisher:	Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/01/2012
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Paul Wilkes is the author, most recently, of In Due Season: A Catholic Life, chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of 2009’s 100 outstanding books. His articles have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine. He is the founder of Homes of Hope India-U.S., which shelters and educates orphan girls in India, and cofounder of CHIPS (Christian Help in Park Slope), a Brooklyn center serving poor and homeless young women and mothers for over 35 years. He lives with his wife in Wilmington, North Carolina.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Confession isn't just for Catholics. Looking seriously at the state of one’s soul is a healthy, hopeful and holy spiritual practice for everyone. In this wise, warm and welcoming book, Wilkes shows how confession can help deepen our relationship with God, heal our relationships with others, and move us toward becoming the people we are called to be." —James Martin, SJ, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything

"There are insights here I will be incorporating into my own life—and that I'm equally eager to share with a congregation." —Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People

“This book illuminates the Atonement, the most powerful way of cleaning up the past and readying your heart to start over again. It truly does enlighten and restore.” —Marianne Williamson, author of A Return to Love

Marianne Williamson

“This book illuminates the Atonement, the most powerful way of cleaning up the past and readying your heart to start over again. It truly does enlighten and restore.” —Marianne Williamson, author of A Return to Love

Editorial Reviews

Wilkes (founder, Homes of Hope India-U.S.; In Due Season: A Catholic Life), a journalist and documentarian of long experience, addresses the question of confession. Although Wilkes is a professing Catholic, his interest here is in both the history and the broader ramifications of confession within and without the confessional booth. Wilkes argues that confession, rightly understood and practiced with awareness and care, can be a balm to the self and the society and lead to genuine reform. VERDICT This brief but effective treatment of the subject of confession should be of interest to historians of religious thought as well as useful to clergy and others in helping professions.

Library Journal