Acclaimed author Parker J. Palmer reveals the same compassionate intelligence that shaped his best-selling books Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach in A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life (Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint; June 2009; $19.95; ISBN: 978-0-470-45376-6).
Parker J. Palmer identifies our yearning to live undivided lives–lives that are congruent with our inner truth–in a world filled with the forces of fragmentation. In the midst of our economic recession, Palmer’s prescription for an inner journey taken in solitude and in the company of others will resonate with readers looking to find their true calling.
For more than a decade, the principle and practices in this book have been proven on the ground–by parents and educators, clergy and politicians, community organizers and corporate executives, physicians and attorneys, and many others who seek to rejoin soul and role in their private and public lives. Using trust circles as the basis for practical application, A Hidden Wholeness weaves together themes that its author has pursued for 40 years: the shape of an integral life, the meaning of community, teaching and learning for transformation, and nonviolent social change.
Additionally, a DVD and Reader’/Leader’s guide is available. The DVD contains interviews with Palmer and footage from retreats he facilitated for the Center for Courage & Renewal; the guide offers a conversation with the author, as well as engagement with the text. Together, these features give readers new ways to internalize the themes of A Hidden Wholeness in order to sustain identity and integrity in all the venues of their lives.
Excerpt from A Hidden Wholeness:
“ As teenagers and young adults, we learned self-knowledge counts for little on the road to workplace success. What counts is the “objective” knowledge that empowers us to manipulate the world. Ethics, taught in this context, becomes one more arm’s-length study of great thinkers; and their thoughts, one more exercise in data collection that fails to inform our hearts.
I value ethical standards, of course. But in a culture like ours–which devalues or dismisses the reality and power of the inner life–ethics too often becomes an external code for conduct, an objective set of rules we are told to follow, a moral exoskeleton we put on hoping to prop ourselves up. The problem with exoskeletons is simple: We can slip them off as easily as we can don them.
I also value integrity. But that word means much more than adherence to a moral code: It means “the state or quality of being entire, complete and unbroken,” as in integer or integral. Deeper still, integrity refers to something, such as a jack pine or the human self–in its “unimpaired, unadulterated or genuine state, corresponding to its original condition.”
When we understand integrity for what it is, we stop obsessing over codes of conduct and embark on the more demanding journey toward being whole. Then we learn the truth of John Middleton Murry’s remark, “For the good (person) to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a straight and narrow path compared to which his (or her) previous rectitude was flowery license.”
About the Author:
Parker J. Palmer is a highly respected writer, lecturer, teacher and activist. His work speaks deeply to people from many walks of life. The Leadership Project, a 1998 survey of 10,000 American educators, named him one of the 30 most influential senior leaders in higher education and one of 10 key “agenda-setters” of the past decade. Author of six previous books, including bestsellers Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach, his writing has been recognized with eight honorary doctorates and several national awards. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Ordering information can be found here.
