Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1087154 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 351 pages

Customer Reviews

Manual for 'a spirituality of liberation'
Fr. Edward Hays, a priest and director of a Roman Catholic retreat center, has written a worthwhile and very useful guide to `escaping' from the various self-made `prisons' we twenty-first century humans find ourselves in. He believes that the salvation Jesus brought is aimed not only at getting us into heaven, but also that salvation involves freeing ourselves from the prisons we find ourselves in so that we can be the mature children our father intended us to be.

The book is devoted to a number of what he calls `prisons': shortage of time, anger, prejudice, depression, fear, old-age, and many more, each covered in its own chapter. He analyzes the causes of each prison, with attention paid to the spiritual dimension of each. And then, armed with his analysis of the causes, he goes into how we can go about breaking-freeing of each. The use of the noun `Manual' in the title is apt, as this book gives very concrete advice on how to deal with and when possible escape the various prisons analyzed. Every chapter ends with a number of specific suggestions for techniques things
to try, and things to avoid.

Fr. Hays is very insightful into the human condition, and seems to have a keen knowledge of human psychology, in addition to possessing a great spiritual maturity. His expertise is
in his subject matter, more so than the ability to write. His writing style is a little unusual, in that he uses extremely colorful language and describes things in very colorful metaphors
of his own making, frequently very novel. When they work they add a great deal of color and added depth. When they don't, they `clunk' and are blunt to the point of being shocking.

One of his prisons is `the sacred penitentiary of religion', in which he analyzes some of the ways religion is perverted and turned into a prison for the believer. Unlike another reviewer, our church study-group did not find this book to be at all hostile to biblical Christianity. Hays does however have some very strong (most would call 'liberal')opinions on some controversial issues, and does berate some abusive mis-use of the teachings of Christ by Christians and our churches,

This book is well suited to a church group-study format.

The Great Escape Manual is no escape
I found this book to be useless. It randomly rambled about the evils of any belief in truth. The author's bias against Biblical Christianity is so strong that he seems to be on more of a vendetta against real Christians than on a mission to free people. I'm sorry for the miserable life he must have lived to have written something like this. The only good thing I can say about this book is that it burned well in my stove.