Reviews
A truly historical document, Memory and Identity contains Pope John Paul II's personal thoughts on some of the most challenging issues and events of his turbulent times. Pope for over 26 years, he was one of the world's greatest communicators and this moving book provides a unique insight into his intellectual and spiritual journey and pastoral experience. Each chapter suggests the answer to a question which either exercised his mind or which he provoked in discussion with laymen and priests. Using the encounters at his summer residence of Castel Gandolfo where conversations took place with leading intellectuals - philosophers as well as theologians - Pope John Paul II addressed in his book many of the questions which arose from these discussions. Here he leaves for posterity an intellectual and spiritual testament in an attempt to seek the answer to defining problems that vex our lives.
"I like my Popes intellectual. I like them citing Aristotle, Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Sartre and Dostoevsky.... It is gratifying, in this volume of conversations with Pope John Paul II to be treated to philosophical cogitation... John Paul II has long reflected upon such big ideas as freedom and responsibility, love and redemption, totalitarianism, capitalism and the nature of evil.... His account of surviving the assassin's bullet is both touching and human."
MARY KENNY
NEW STATESMAN
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