The Art of Confession: Renewing Yourself Through the Practice of Honesty

Paul Wilkes

Jan 2012 · Workman Publishing

About this ebook

Paul Wilkes has written an elegant, prescriptive, secular bookÑa spiritual gemÑthat reinvents the power of confession for a contemporary audience. Confession is the foundation of religion, the essence of mental health. It is listening to the voice within to follow the path to honest and conscious living. And for thousands of years people have used the power of confession to find their best selves.

Liberating confession from the confessional, The Art of Confession draws on traditions as old as ancient Greece and as modern as psychoanalysis as diverse as Judaism, Catholicism, and Islam, to show readers how to incorporate a confessional practice into their daily lives. There are visualizations, spiritual exercises, prompts, and meditations; private confessions, direct confessions, psychological confessions.

Accompanied throughout by a wise Òconfessional chorusÓÑa rabbi, a priest, a psychiatrist, a nun, whose points-of-view complement and augment the textÑThe Art of Confession is an antidote to our age of oversharing, where we happily broadcast the minutest details of our lives in public, yet never find the time to discover the risk, relief, and ultimately the renewal that real, considered self-reflection offers.

About the author

Paul Wilkesis the author, most recently, of

In Due Season: A Catholic Life,chosen byPublishers Weeklyas one of 2009's 100 outstanding books. His articles have appeared inThe New Yorker, The Atlantic,andThe New York Times Magazine.He is the founder of Homes of Hope India-U.S., which shelters

and educates orphan girls in India, and cofounder of CHIPS (Christian Help in Park Slope), a Brooklyn center serving poor and homeless young women and mothers for over 35 years. He lives with his wife in Wilmington, North Carolina.