Backpacking with the Saints

November 10, 2014
Lane’s work blends genres, combining the literature of the outdoors with the formal literature of the spiritual as he reviews the work of the world’s prominent religious and spiritual writers and ties their insights to the features and experiences of exploring the natural world. A respected professor of theological studies at Saint Louis University and a frequent backpacker, Lane (The Solace of Fierce Landscapes) juxtaposes the academic with the personal, presenting brief historical summaries of thinkers like Rumi, Therese of Liseux, and Thich Nhat Hanh while using his own life experiences and backpacking trips to parallel certain spiritual insights from his reading. Lane’s prose is lush and descriptive, but occasionally self-indulgent as he encounters the difficulties of expressing the sublime and the spiritual in words. The book also starts slowly, overly laden in theory. Yet it eventually becomes more compelling as the author situates his useful introduction to the joys of backpacking and the work of the featured thinkers in his open and tender detailing of his life’s trajectory, creating pleasure for readers of all genres.

November 15, 2014
Lane, a professor of religion at St. Louis University, offers an attractively genre-crossing companion for readers seeking inspiring meditation guidance. An experienced hiker, he takes introspective and celebratory spiritual illumination from a variety of mostly American wilderness areas, each hike accompanied by a meditative reading from such varied sources as John of the Cross, Kierkegaard, Teilhard de Chardin, and Gandhi. In describing his own life experiences as well as wilderness areas in the Ozarks, Aravaipa Canyon, and Ireland's revered retreat areas, he offers both practical advice (how to lighten a backpack) as well as gracefully tying back the solo hikes to experiences in leading men's recovery groups and his marriage. The carefully balanced writing about landscape, physical demands, spiritual awakenings, and literary companionship allows the reader to see, feel, and join in the meditation. An excellent companion to works on pilgrimage, such as Dispenza's The Way of the Traveler (1999).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)