Twenty years in the making, in Letters from the American Desert, Glaysher reflects on the cultural, political, and religious history of Western and non-Western civilizations,pondering the dilemmas of postmodernity, in a compelling struggle for spiritual knowledge and truth. In what is a highly autobiographical work, fully cognizant of the relativism and nihilism of modern life, Glaysher finds a deeper meaning and purpose in a universal Vision. Confronting the antinomies of the soul, grounded in the dialectic, Glaysher charts a path beyond the postmodern desert.

Alluding extensively to Martin Luther and W. B. Yeats at All Souls Chapel, “metaphors for poetry,” from Yeats’s book A Vision, Glaysher considers the example of the global, universal message of the oneness of God, all religions, and humankind, holding out a new hope and peaceful Vision for a world in spiritual and global crisis.

Far from a theocracy, Glaysher envisions a modest separation of church and state, as the will of God, in an unorganized religion, a universal synthesis of all spiritual and wisdom traditions, in harmony and balance with universal peace, in a global age of pluralism, where religious belief is a distinctive mark of the individual, not collective, communal identity.

Reviews

"A valuable contribution to understanding the real history of the Bahai Faith." —Yahoo! Reform Bahai Group

"Riveting! I was unable to put it down until completion in the wee hours. As the journey of the writer took many years to complete, it reminded me, too, of my Bahai journey... Strangely, I had never remembered seeing Abdu'l-Baha's 1912 Covenant, anywhere. Where was it hidden? Is there more such documented evidence being suppressed?" —Reform Bahai Faith Forum

"Mr. Glaysher, in my view, is taking some positive steps to resolve some serious issues in the Baha'i community. ...The Faith needs a total overhaul. It has forgotten what the real Faith is." ***—***Joel Bjorling, author of The Baha'i Faith: A Historical Bibliography. New York. Garland Publishing, 1985.

About the Author

FREDERICK GLAYSHER is an epic poet, rhapsode, poet-critic, and the author or editor of ten books.

Glaysher studied writing under a private tutorial, at the University of Michigan, with the poet Robert Hayden and edited Hayden's prose and poetry. He holds two degrees from the University of Michigan, has lived in Japan and traveled widely in China, and was a Fulbright-Hays scholar to China and a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar on India.

Website: https://fglaysher.com

Blog: https://fglaysher.com/TheGlobe

Twitter: twitter.com/fglaysher