The Reverend Ralph Harper, a philosopher and theologian, has been credited with introducing existentialism to North America in 1948 with his work Existentialism: A Theory of Man. Forty years later, Harper delved deeper into the interior life of the human imagination in On Presence: Variations and Reflections. Winner of the 1992 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, On Presence is an insightful articulation of mankind's experience of presence. Drawing from philosophers like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Marcel, theologians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Tillich, mystics (...) like Meister Eckhart and John of the Cross, and novelists like Dostoevsky and Proust, this compelling work considers the transcendent and religious dimensions of the ordinary mysteries in everyday life. (shrink)

Augustine and Proust—the passion for God and the passion for creation.

In these three predecessors of existentialism, all of whom were profoundly influenced by Stendhal, author Ralph Harper finds evidence of that spiritual isolation which leads ultimately to personal solitude and philosophical nihilism. To these negative modes of being he opposes the alternatives embodied by St. Augustine and Proust—the passion for God and the passion for creation.