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My Grandfather's House: A Genealogy of Doubt and Faith
A history of faith, doubt, and religious belief told through five centuries in the lives of one remarkable family, by the award winning author of In the Deep Midwinter and Mr. White's Confession
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 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 thelolgical 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 firery preaching of Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather; 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. My Grandfather's House is a profound, passionate book that will speak to readers of Karen Armstrong and Kathleen Norris.
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 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 thelolgical 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 firery preaching of Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather; 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. My Grandfather's House is a profound, passionate book that will speak to readers of Karen Armstrong and Kathleen Norris.
- GenresMemoir
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
About the author
Robert Clark
13 books35 followersRobert Clark is a novelist and writer of nonfiction. He received the Edgar Award for his novel Mr. White's Confession in 1999. A native of St. Paul, Minneapolis, he lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.
Clark's books touch on several genres but often return to questions centered in God: "Is there a God? Does he love us? Is he even paying attention?"
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Robert^^^Clark
Clark's books touch on several genres but often return to questions centered in God: "Is there a God? Does he love us? Is he even paying attention?"
Librarian note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Robert^^^Clark
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 12, 2010
Tracing his ancestry back 500 years, PNBA (Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association) 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.(Quoted from a trade review)
“Clark, keenly aware of his narrative’s singularity, tries hard to situate it in the literary canon. He calls it a confessio, akin to Augustine’s great prototype — a rumination on and among his memories with the simple end of praising his God and comprehending himself” — but Clark wanders into fields of which Augustine never dreamed. He begins by tracking his memories and those of his family back to Reformation England and his oldest known ancestor, John Griggs. So far, this is standard family history, but Clark apparently sensed that his bloodline alone could not transmit the complexities of half a millennium of religious development. Therefore, in what constitutes either a daring expansion of the genre or a freely indulged penchant for digression, he shifts his focus at every opportunity to the notable figures of the age — in this case, from the Griggses to Henry VIII, that theocrat and thug whom he wittily calls ”the very Babe Ruth of divorce.”
And so it goes, through the Puritans, the America migrations, the Salem witch trials, the Transcendentalists and into modernity. Clark details each religious climate by shuttling between family and wider world, presenting vague portraits of his ancestors — the available records are often sparse — and vivid ones of historical greats like Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Hawthorne and Melville. He fragments his narrative further by interspersing, at odd intervals, the story of his own religious meanderings. We learn of child cruelties, adolescent antics and adult traumas, all hinting at an unfulfilled yearning for a spiritual home.”
From PHILIP ZALESKI’s review in the NY Times.
My reading selections here:
http://payingattentiontothesky.com/20...
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.(Quoted from a trade review)
“Clark, keenly aware of his narrative’s singularity, tries hard to situate it in the literary canon. He calls it a confessio, akin to Augustine’s great prototype — a rumination on and among his memories with the simple end of praising his God and comprehending himself” — but Clark wanders into fields of which Augustine never dreamed. He begins by tracking his memories and those of his family back to Reformation England and his oldest known ancestor, John Griggs. So far, this is standard family history, but Clark apparently sensed that his bloodline alone could not transmit the complexities of half a millennium of religious development. Therefore, in what constitutes either a daring expansion of the genre or a freely indulged penchant for digression, he shifts his focus at every opportunity to the notable figures of the age — in this case, from the Griggses to Henry VIII, that theocrat and thug whom he wittily calls ”the very Babe Ruth of divorce.”
And so it goes, through the Puritans, the America migrations, the Salem witch trials, the Transcendentalists and into modernity. Clark details each religious climate by shuttling between family and wider world, presenting vague portraits of his ancestors — the available records are often sparse — and vivid ones of historical greats like Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Hawthorne and Melville. He fragments his narrative further by interspersing, at odd intervals, the story of his own religious meanderings. We learn of child cruelties, adolescent antics and adult traumas, all hinting at an unfulfilled yearning for a spiritual home.”
From PHILIP ZALESKI’s review in the NY Times.
My reading selections here:
http://payingattentiontothesky.com/20...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 12, 2017
Enjoyable trip through someone's genealogical tree. Funny thing, a relative of the writer has a memorial stone in Brewster on Cape Cod and I was looking for the grandfather's house on that street. Not realizing until the end of the book that the home was elsewhere . ha ha.
July 11, 2008
Clark combines two of my great interests: who we came from and why we're here. He traces his English ancestors' religious lives, and it's a mirror of the break from Catholicism, through the Protestant movements of the United States. I've discovered ancestors of my own who were part of that same history, and I related to Clark's narrative and observations.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews