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Shaping a Life: Reconstructing My First Thirty-Five Years
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by:
ISBN:
0-7414-4805-X
©2008
Price:
$16.95
Book Size:
5.5'' x 8.5''
, 288 pages
Category/Subject:
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
Why does a man become a priest? Why does he leave the priesthood? William Powers shares his story. Love led him to the altar, and the search for love drew him away.
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Abstract:
The back cover of William F. Powers’ 2006 novel, Love is Strong as Death, says that although not autobiographical, the book “draws from Powers’ experiences as a Roman Catholic priest.” Shaping a Life also draws from that experience, but this time it is autobiographical. Ordained in 1959, Powers ministered for nine years in an inner city Brooklyn parish and for a year in suburban Queens. He then left the priesthood. Shaping a Life is his effort to reconstruct his life up to 1969 when, at age 34, he took off the Roman collar and ventured into the “real world.”
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Customer Reviews
Author's Reflection
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07/26/2008
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Reviewer:
Bill Powers
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The process of writing this book took about two years. Working on it was like a long retreat, a prolonged period of reflection. As I hold the finished product in my hands, I realize that to a large extent it recounts not just my personal story but the story of a now all but vanished world.
The English novelist, Thomas Hardy, has long been one of my favorite authors. Hardy's books are touching stories of people who lived in a rural, pre-industrial land. We can't personally relate to the setting, the culture in which the stories are set, but we can relate to the characters. There is something universal and timeless in how they think and act and love.
My story is also about a world that has been swallowed up in change, a world before television and computers and sexual freedom. It was a time of unquestioning faith, of simpler pleasures, of naivete. I hope that "Shaping a Life" communicates something of what that lost world was like.
The reader might, as it were, make a retreat with me, reflecting on his/her own life while accompanying me as I journey through my New York Irish Catholic mid-20th century adventure.
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