In this age of electronic noise, political antagonism, and general discontent, where can one find guidance to coherent living that matters? Mel Keiser provides the reader with a menu of thinkers who provide such guidance from distinct but largely compatible perspectives. Michael Polanyi’s post-critical philosophy, with its emphasis on the tacit dimension, plays the leading role in Keiser’s constructive thought. But Keiser seasons his thought with such additional influences as Augustine’s reflections and confessions, Merleau-Ponty’s notion of figure and ground, H. Richard Niebuhr’s responsible self, Paul Tillich’s dimension of depth, the Quaker practice of silence, and Stanley Hopper’s substitution of imaginative theopoiesis for the overly rigid and objectivist categories of much theology. Paths to the Personal delivers to the spiritually hungry a delicious feast of peaceful promise.

– Walter B. Gulick, author of Recovering Truths: A Comprehensive Anthology of Michael Polanyi’s Writings

Aptly titled, Paths to the Personal presents Keiser’s quest to understand what “personal,” at its most profound, means. Writing in multiple genres, such as academic essays, meditations, and letters to a friend, he engages the thought of numerous thinkers across the ages including St. Augustine, Mircea Eliade, Paul Tillich, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as his Quaker religious tradition. At center stage, however, are Michael Polanyi, H. Richard Niebuhr, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Stanley Hopper, and William Poteat. Drawing creatively from these thinkers, Keiser develops compelling insights into phenomenology, psychology, theology, and religious experience that are deeply personal but far from private. They reflect his personal commitments rooted in the tacit that invite dialogue with others in the quest to integrate our embodied, passionate knowing, feeling, and doing.

– Paul Lewis, Professor of Religion and Director, Ethics, Leadership, and Service Minor, Columbus Roberts Department of Religion, Mercer University, Macon, Georgia

Between his post-critical theopoetics and his Quaker Silence, Mel Keiser unfolds a way at once imaginative in its honesty, rigorous in its contemplation, mysterious in its “leadings.”

– Catherine Keller, George T. Cobb Professor of Constructive Theology, Drew University Theological School