Kaleidoscope: The Way of Woman and Other Essays

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At an age when most people would be thinking about retirement, Helen M. Luke embarked on two new careers, helping found the Apple Farm Community, a retreat and study center near Three Rivers, Michigan, and simultaneously making her debut as a writer, drawing on a lifetime of spiritual and psychological counseling. These essays, published over the past three decades, show the breadth of Luke's experiences as a Jungian psychologist, lecturer, and author. The collection is divided into three sections, indicative of three main streams in Luke's own thinking: her distinctive viewpoint as a woman who has lived through and observed every decade of the present century; the importance of Anglo-Catholicism as a touchstone for responsibility and discrimination in her search; her lifelong love of examining the world's great literature as a route towards knowledge. Luke's ideas are often iconoclastic to contemporary attitudes of sexual politics, religious dogma, and literary interpretation: her approach is individual and unique, rigorous and refreshing, as she combines these three paths — the way of woman, the way of discrimination, and the way of story — into a kaleidoscope of the inner journey so necessary to us all.