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"Ten years ago, when Harvard professor James Kugel was diagnosed with an aggressive, likely fatal, form of cancer, &#8220;I was, of course, disturbed and worried. But the main change in my state of mind was that . . . the background music had suddenly stopped. . . . the music of daily life that&#8217;s constantly going, the music of infinite time and possibilities. Now suddenly it was gone, replaced by nothing, just silence. There you are, one little person, sitting in the late-summer sun, with only a few things left to do.&#8221; Despite his illness, Kugel was intrigued by this new state of mind; it seemed to reveal something basic about the religions that he had been studying for years. In this wide-ranging exploration of religion throughout the ages, interspersed with personal reflection on the course of his illness, Kugel mines a rich store of sources in an attempt to understand mankind&#8217;s unending series of encounters with God, from ancient accounts of human meetings with gods and angels, to first-person narratives of religious conversions and the findings of neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists about religious belief. A rigorously honest, sometimes skeptical, but ultimately deeply moving affirmation of religious faith, In the Valley of the Shadow is a powerful meditation on humanity&#8217;s place in the world and life&#8217;s greatest mystery."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://books.simonandschuster.com/In-the-Valley-of-the-Shadow/James-L-Kugel/9781439130100>