As with any friend, I became involved in their lives.” Further, he writes, “I interrogated their lives for the meaning of my own.” As Lischer writes of the more than 20 authors (all Christians) whose memoirs he covers in Our Hearts Are Restless, “they had become my friends. In Richard Lischer’s Our Hearts Are Restless: The Art of Spiritual Memoir, the author notes that “spiritual memoir is an intimate genre, perhaps the most intimate.” Further, engaging with the spiritual memoirs of others seems to work as a goad for every reader to do some self-reflection. I was impressed by the depth of their reflections-and somewhat taken aback by their vulnerability and honesty in relating such personal stories to a teacher. They identified struggles with belief, emotional and mental breakthroughs, cathartic realizations about the faults (or sacrifices) of their parents and mentors, the reverberations of personal traumas, and even the occasional moments of unexpected grace in their lives. Students who were not always articulate when analyzing literature or evaluating the interior lives of noted spiritual writers proved to be remarkably eloquent and insightful on the subject of their own. Our Hearts Are Restless by Richard Lischer
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