Paths to the Personal: Thinkers on the Way to Postcritical and Theopoetic Depths seeks to define and explore the dimension of the personal underlying all knowing, doing, being, and religion. Using a lens combining Michael Polanyi’s postcritical and Stanley Hopper’s theopoetic thought, which carries the author into and beyond their explorative depths of the personal, Keiser asks to what degree the personal is present in the thinking of Augustine, Tillich, H.R. Niebuhr, Fritz Buri, Freud, Mircea Eliade, Merleau-Ponty, William Poteat, Hopper, and Polanyi. The immersive issues in these pages are: how we know; how words (symbols, metaphors, myths, and religious talk) work; contributions of philosophy to justice and peace-making; and the nature of religious thinking and being. While not focused on Quaker thought and spirituality, the author's Quaker perspective undergirds these inquiries.

R. Melvin Keiser, Professor Emeritus of Religious and Interdisciplinary Studies, Guilford College, Greensboro, North Carolina, USA, is a member of Swannanoa Valley Friends Meeting, and has been co-director with his wife, Beth, of the Quaker-based Common Light Meetingplace in the Asheville, North Carolina area. He lives in Black Mountain, NC.