View of Monument Valley, Utah, from Mystery Valley
My new book: Desert Spirit Places: The Sacred Southwest will be published in next few months. Here is a description of the book and some of the endorsements:
Desert Spirit Places: The Sacred Southwest, Brad Karelius.
To be published by Wipf and Stock Publishers in December 2018.
Description of book:
The iconic landscape, the American Southwest, reveals luminescent mittens, looming rock arches and vast sagebrush oceans made vivid and memorable by writer Tony Hillerman, artist Georgia O’Keefe and director John Ford. Professor Brad Karelius, drawing on forty years of college teaching, will guide you into hidden mysteries of the sacred as revealed by the Zuni, Navajo/Diné, Hopi, Hispanos and desert mystics as you seek spiritual encounters in these desert spirit places.
Endorsements
Author with Don Mose at Skull Rock, Mystery Valley, Utah
Brad Karelius has mastered the art of successfully combining a personal narrative with joyful observations of the natural world. His graceful writing adds generous helpings of both humor and humility to a story of adventure and insight gained from spending quiet time beneath the towering Western sky. Well-selected quotes from scholars and mystics underline the author’s own observations about the links between the rugged beauty of the desert and the flowering of a spiritual life. This is a book to savor and to keep at one’s bedside as an antidote to life’s anxiety. If my mother still shared our planet, it would be her birthday gift.
Anne Hillerman, Author, Cave of Bones.
For some years I have deeply valued Father Brad Karelius’ beautiful writings on the spirituality of the desert. There is a deep continuity between the sayings of the early Christian desert fathers of the fourth century and these contemporary journeys that are both physical and spiritual, though these forms of journeying cannot finally be separated.
I have found these personal writings of Father Karelius deeply moving and inspiring at many levels. The desert is here never less than a real place, but within its harsh and beautiful landscape we find also the wisdom of deep spirituality – learnt also from St. Ignatius of Loyola and many others. And then there is, for Father Karelius, his disabled son Erik, his guide into Second Naivete. Innocence and wisdom come together in this wise for book our troubled age.”
David Jasper, University of Glasgow, Scotland
Brad Karelius has invested his well-lived life in an engagement with the Southwest desert. From that life-experience he articulates deep respect for the native Americans who live there and their traditions, deep awe at the mystery or the place that he knows be haunted in holy ways, and deep faith as he mediates between the Christian Gospel and native American religious traditions. The outcome of his writing is testimony to the “otherwise” he finds there, an alternative to the self-destructive ways of our dominant culture. Other readers will find as compelling as do I his direct first-person narrative witness. My reading of his book has led me to fresh gratitude for Brad and for his son Erik.
Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary
Here find a learned and seasoned guide to the deep desert offering so much to the seeking spirit.
John R. Stilgoe, Harvard University.
Part memoir, part travelogue, and part self-help guidebook, Desert Spirit Places relates how the soul of one inquisitive man finds solace and experiences healing in the harshest of landscapes—and shows how others can also experience that grace.
Richard Francaviglia, author, Believing in Place.
