Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West

Originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1989, "Coming to Our Senses" is the second volume in a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness, and the recipient (in 1990) of the Governor's Writers Award for Washington State. (The first, "The Reenchantment of the World," was published in 1981 by Cornell University Press; the third, "Wandering God," was released in 2000 by the State University of New York Press.) The focus of this particular volume is the relationship between culture and the human body, and the somatic basis of Western religious experience. Whereas the first volume in the series is largely historical, and the third largely anthropological, "Coming to Our Senses" focuses on human psychology, especially the earliest years of life, and how this has historically influenced the nature of adult life and institutions in the West.