My Grandfather's House

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My Grandfather's House: A Genealogy of Doubt and Faith

Author: Robert Clark
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Publisher: Picador USA
In My Grandfather’s House, Robert Clark traces the spiritual quests and struggles of his ancestors, from England’s split with the Church of Rome at the end of the middle ages to his own return to the faith five hundred years later. Clark reconstructs their lives as medieval Catholics, heretics, and inquisitors in the England of Henry VII; as Puritan settlers, participants in Indian wars, and accusers in witch trials in New England in the 1600s; as preachers, artists, writers, and agnostics during the theological and intellectual upheavals of the 19th century that left them exploring creeds ranging from evangelical Protestantism to Unitarianism to Buddhism to atheism. In the context of King Henry’s divorces and his quarrel with both the Pope and Martin Luther; the religious and personal struggles of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Margaret Fuller, Clark weaves a rich history that culminates in his own quest through doubt toward faith.

Profound, moving, and ultimately inspiring, My Grandfather’s House is a vivid and original account of the persistence of belief through five centuries of questing and questioning.

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Amazon.com

Tracing his ancestry back 500 years, PNBA book award-winner Robert Clark (Mr. White’s Confessions) maps a legacy of religious belief, disbelief, and faith that mirrors his own spiritual quest. Although he speaks to his recent re-entry into the Catholic Church (the original church of his 500-year-old ancestors), Clark has not written a predictable “I once was lost but now I’m found” autobiography. Rather, he examines a familiar English-American religious legacy. “Like my forebears, I have been variously, and sometimes simultaneously, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Puritan, a Transcendentalist, an agnostic, and an atheist,” Clark explains in the introduction to the book. Using his own journey of doubt and faith as the narrative framework, Clark weaves in the religious stories of his ancestors. We meet the Clark family members as inquisitors during the rein of Henry VIII, as Puritan settlers, as accusers in witch trails, and as cohorts of Emerson and Thoreau. Clark has great command over his ancestors’ stories, his own story, and his story-telling ability. As a result, he has pulled this ambitious autobiography together in a way that is historically informative, consistently entertaining, and personally meaningful. Deftly and often humorously, he helps us see how our ancestors’ religious conversions, confusions, and conquests often reflect our own. —Gail Hudson

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