Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as a Spiritual Practice

Lane’s work blends genres, combining the literature of the outdoors with the formal literature of the spiritual as he reviews the work of the world’s prominent religious and spiritual writers and ties their insights to the features and experiences of exploring the natural world. A respected professor of theological studies at Saint Louis University and a frequent backpacker, Lane (The Solace of Fierce Landscapes) juxtaposes the academic with the personal, presenting brief historical summaries of thinkers like Rumi, Therese of Liseux, and Thich Nhat Hanh while using his own life experiences and backpacking trips to parallel certain spiritual insights from his reading. Lane’s prose is lush and descriptive, but occasionally self-indulgent as he encounters the difficulties of expressing the sublime and the spiritual in words. The book also starts slowly, overly laden in theory. Yet it eventually becomes more compelling as the author situates his useful introduction to the joys of backpacking and the work of the featured thinkers in his open and tender detailing of his life’s trajectory, creating pleasure for readers of all genres. (Dec.)