Revolutions of the Heart
Literary, Cultural, & Spiritual
- Arts & Literature
- Publisher: Resource Publications (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2020
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Publisher's Description
Revolutions of the Heart is a genre-bending book where literature, social activism, and mysticism intersect. In this follow-up to Lababidi's first essay collection, Trial by Ink: From Nietzsche to Bellydancing (2010), the author is undergoing an inner change, as is the world around him. The multifaceted meditations in Revolutions--essays, poems, aphorisms, conversations, and even fiction--explore the edifying power of art, Islamophobia and its antidotes, the Egyptian Revolution and its aftermath, American popular culture, and much else in our complex modern world. A series of rich conversations with Lababidi, and his various provocative interlocutors, shed more intimate light on the subjects under discussion. At times serious, playful, and seriously playful, these exuberant exchanges chart the personal evolution of Lababidi from angst-ridden existentialist thinker, besotted with the life of the mind, to someone chastened, drawn to Sufism and seeking to surrender before the primacy of spiritual life. On a political level, as the work of an immigrant and Muslim (living in Trump's divided America and our wounded world), Revolutions is a book of hope and healing, arguing for nuance and compassion, as it attempts to present art as a form of cultural diplomacy and tool for transformation.
Endorsements (5)
“Lababidi is extremely generous with his attention in this eclectic collection of essays, interviews, poems, and aphorisms, covering everything from Omar Sharif to Sufi mysticism. In Revolutions, Lababidi converses with readers about that rarest and purest expression of the human spirit: the creative mind at work.”
“Revolutions of the Heart is a warm, intelligent, thought-provoking work of what we might call comparative spirituality, or spiritual lit crit. . . . Hovering over a wide range of topics, from the poet Rimbaud and the novelist John Banville, to the political ambitions of Marianne Williamson and the religious journey of C. S. Lewis—with thoughtful reflections of Sufism, the lost art of conversation, the inspiring power of blogging, Zen, cults, and much else along the way—Lababidi speaks in a voice all his own: personal, engaged, highly literate, and wholly entertaining.”
“Yahia Lababidi stands you at the crossroads of literature, culture, and spirituality and shares the view in ways which are both stunningly telescopic and fascinatingly microscopic. Either way, it is breathtaking.”
“Revolutions of the Heart, a stunning collection of essays and aphorisms—essays about aphorisms, aphorisms about the essay—thrills me from head to heart.”
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