Enduring Lives: Portraits of Women and Faith in Action

In Enduring Lives, the sister volume to her bestselling classic Enduring Grace, Carol Lee Flinders draws riveting portraits of women who are the spiritual great-granddaughters of the female mystics and saints profiled in Enduring Grace. Tracing the spiritual "mother line" of these holy women of centuries past-Julian of Norwich, Saint Catherine of Siena, and Saint Catherine of Genoa-to contemporary women whose lives have been lived with a similar passion for and dedication to improving the human condition, Flinders explores the spiritual journeys of:

- Jane Goodall, a world-renowned scientist, environmentalist, and humanitarian, whose groundbreaking work runs parallel to a deeply realized spiritual vision for our times.
- Etty Hillesum, a Jewish intellectual in Amsterdam who documented in her diaries an abiding vision for the eventual triumph of human good over evil, even as she faced the horror of Auschwitz.
- Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun who befriended death-row inmates and accompanied them to their ends with the grace of her certainty that "God dwells in the people that we most want to throw away." (Sister Helen Prejean was portrayed by Susan Sarandon in the Oscar-winning film Dead Man Walking.)
- Tenzin Palmo, a Tibetan Buddhist nun, whose twelve years of meditation in a Himalayan cave led her to emerge with a road map for ending human suffering.

With these fascinating profiles of four contemporary women of faith, Carol Flinders illuminates the heart of the feminine sacred and provides inspiration for female spiritual seekers everywhere.

A Passion for Life

What an intriguing title! Is this book about immortality? The cover of Enduring Lives intimates a book about Catholicism. But it would be a mistake to catalog this book under Religion. Enduring Lives belongs more with Women's Studies, an evolving discipline in which Carol Lee Flinders breaks new ground.

Speaking generally, men are not keen readers of Women's Studies. However, if they can overcome this disinclination, in this book they will uncover a new perspective on women's sexuality and social organization. For, who best to understand the role sex hormones play on a woman's psyche than those who are denied a sexual partner, either involuntarily or by intent? The question may be: How are biological impulses transmuted into a socially acceptable existence? Scientists often look at aberrations to discover the boundaries of what we assume is the norm. In Enduring Lives we look at some of these boundaries.

There is much to be learned from this well written, edited, and designed book. On the surface, Enduring Lives is a set of distilled biographies of four women who, at first glance, have nothing in common; not in the times they lived, the location, not their religious upbringing, nor in their contribution to our society. Only a scholar with the knowledge of Carol Lee Flinders could weave the biographies of a concentration camp victim, a Ph.D. from Cambridge who studied the Chimpanzee, a recluse from Tibet who started life in war-torn London, and a woman whose work was featured in the movie Dead Man Walking, into an exciting, cohesive account of the amazing evolution of human spirit. The author is informed by her own scholarship, a well argued (non-defamatory) critique of Catholicism, and most of all by a deep understanding of how spirit allows us to survive in a troubled world that seems increasingly to deny opportunity for our very existence

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