Varieties of Transcendental Experience
A Study in Constructive Postmodernism
by Donald L. Gelpi, S.J.
372 pp., 6 x 9
Price: $34.95; SALE PhP 750.00

A retrieval of the neglected part of the religious and intellectual history of the United States, Varieties of Transcendental Experience, throws light on the debate over postmodernism.

Varieties of Transcendental Experience traces the critique of Enlightenment modernism which began with Ralph Waldo Emerson and culminated in the thought of Charles Sanders Peirce and the mature Josiah Royce. Donald L. Gelpi, S.J., argues that these thinkers provide a constructive alternative to deconstructionist post-modernism, one that is compatible with Christian faith.

In each chapter Gelpi analyzes various thinkers and their frames of reference developed for dealing with life and reality. While taking into account what historians of the American intellectual tradition have to say about each of the figures studied, Gelpi uses primarily a dialectic approach, looking for areas of agreement and disagreement and assessing the interpretative adequacy of one frame of reference in comparison with another.