The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders

by Jacob Needleman

Overview

Looking at the lives of America's founders-including Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin-scholar and bestselling author Jacob Needleman explores their core of inner beliefs; their religious and spiritual sensibilities; and their individual conception of the purpose of life. 

The founders, Needleman argues, conceived of an "inner democracy": a continual pursuit of wisdom and self-improvement that would undergird the outer democracy in which we live today. Any understanding of America as a nation of spiritual values will in the years ahead require Needleman's work as a point of reference.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781585422265
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/02/2003
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.01(w) x 9.01(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 - 13 Years

About the Author

The acclaimed author of The American Soul, Why Can’t We Be Good? and Money and the Meaning of Life, Jacob Needleman is Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University, and former Director of the Center for the Study of New Religions at the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, CA.

Editorial Reviews

"If ever a work of philosophical ideas arrived at a time when human events make it not only timely but urgently relevant, The American Soul is such a book." -San Francisco Chronicle

"So literate it comes close to poetry...[This] book makes you think and rethink most of the ideas you ever had about the stunning people who give American history both its exceptionalism and its commonalities." -Martin Peretz

From the Publisher

"America is the fact, the symbol and the promise of a new beginning." So writes philosopher Jacob Needleman in the preamble of this persuasive book. In The American Soul, the author of Money and the Meaning of Life shows that the thought of our Founding Fathers was imbued with this spiritual vision. In mini-biographies of early American leaders and thinkers, he contends that they conceived of an "inner democracy," a continual pursuit of wisdom and self-improvement. Drawing on religious traditions, including those of Native Americans and African slaves, he argues that such spiritual teachings had a powerful, often hidden impact on the shape of young America. Thoughtful, serious, and timely.

bn.com

Needleman (Philosophy/San Francisco State Univ.; Money and the Meaning of Life, 1991, etc.) searches out the transcendent ideas that once epitomized the American vision in this spine-stiffening return call to conscience and wisdom.

Kirkus Reviews