Author Description

"In My Grandfather's House, Robert Clark traces the spiritual quests and struggles of his ancestors, from England's split with the Church of Rome at the end of the Middle Ages to his own return to the faith five hundred years later. Clark reconstructs their lives as medieval Catholics, heretics, and inquisitors in the England of Henry VIII; as Puritan settlers, participants in Indian wars, and accusers in witch trials in New England in the 1600s; and as preachers, artists, writers, and agnostics during the theological and intellectual upheavals of the nineteenth century that left them exploring creeds ranging from evangelical Protestantism to Unitarianism to Buddhism to atheism. In the context of King Henry's divorces, his quarrels with both the Pope and Martin Luther, and the religious and personal struggles of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Margaret Fuller. Clark weaves a rich history that culminates in his own quest through doubt toward faith."--BOOK JACKET.