Meaning : a question and a commitment -- Hero and saint : mapping the cultural genome -- The heroic age : the Greek worldview -- Heroism and the tragic view of life -- Plato : politics, justice, and philosophy -- Plato's Republic : the hero's reward -- The heroic ideal in late Stoicism -- "In the beginning" : the Hebrew worldview -- Father Abraham, the first saint -- Saintly types in the Hebrew Bible -- Jesus as saintly innovator : forgiving love -- Hero or saint? Saul of Tarsus.
Hero or saint? Augustine of Hippo -- Mohammed : the prophet as saintly innovator -- Saint Francis and Dante : saintly troubadours -- The agony and ecstasy of Michelangelo -- Enlightenment patterns of cultural mutation -- Mt. Myrah revisited : saintly transgression -- A history of suspicion : Marx, Darwin, Freud -- Nietzsche : the return of the tragic hero -- Dostoevsky : the return of the saint -- A century of trauma -- The quantum leap -- Existentialism : Sartre and de Beauvoir.
Camus and the absurd hero -- Flannery O'Connor and the mystery of grace -- The Holocaust and the crisis of forgiveness -- Faulkner and Beckett : images of the forlorn -- Viktor Frankl : freedom's search for meaning -- Simone Weil : imagining the secular saint -- Simone Weil : a new Augustine? -- Identifying the secular saint -- The secular saint at the movies -- Ernest Becker : the denial of death -- Terror and hope in a planetary age -- The secular saint : learning to walk upright.
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