Vivienne E. Perkins Ph.d.

The Narrow Way: a True Story of Surviving Sexual Abuse Vivienne E. Perkins Ph.d.

Publisher Marketing: The Narrow Way is an honest account of a life, fully lived, under God's all-seeing eye. Although a memoir, it is not a conventional one. No reader will like everything in this book, but every reader struggling with some aspect of life-sexual abuse, marriage, militarism, prison, the loneliness of the American experience, the failure of democratic institutions, the quest for self-knowledge, the search for God-can find something interesting and useful in it. Opening with an examination of the long-term damage done to sexually abused children, Part One covers the problems of marriage, the significance of dreams, art, and literature, an insight into suffering, an approach to understanding Scripture, and the social impact Jesus had on His society via teachings that we are still refusing to take seriously. In Part Two, the author gives an overview of the impact of the so-called "Enlightenment," a period that promised a better human type living in an improved world, but that brought the human family instead to non-stop, high-tech war-making, rampant resource consumption, and an on-coming social, environmental, and economic catastrophe-precisely because Christians, seduced by the products of the machine, have steadily diluted their commitment to Christ, who showed us the "narrow way that leads to life." The Narrow Way-the result of fifty years of hard study of the intellectual and social trends of the past 250 years-is a challenging book. Starting where theologian Reinhold Niebuhr left off, it critiques the so-called American way of life and calls for change.