A Spanner in the Works

(Paperback)

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Exploring the profound impact of science and technology on the world, the author takes us on a journey into our relationship with the machine and its repercussions on contemporary spiritual life. Cowan analyses the role of technicity and the threat it poses to the continued existence of the soul in people. Max Plank, Walter Benjamin and Albert Einstein join ancient and medieval thinkers alike to inform the thrust of his argument.This is a book pertinent to our time in that it asks us to question the value of technicity as soon as it begins to erode our spiritual life. A person's place in the world depends upon redressing the balance. A Spanner in the Works offers startling new insights into how we might overcome our present sense of rootlessness.

Reviews

In A Spanner in the Works, the inimitable James Cowan master of incandescent fiction, and explorer of exotic lands of the spirit reflects on artistic and scientific achievement, and on how, in the flatland of modernity, we can recover a sense of the poetic, the heroic, and the mythic. Erudite, provocative, these are essays to be savoured. -- Arthur Versluis, author of The New Inquisitions, Magic and Mysticism.

Author Bio

James Cowan is author of a number of internationally acclaimed books, including A Troubadour's Testament and Letters from A Wild State. In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Australian Literature Society's Gold Medal for his novel A Mapmaker's Dream. His work has been translated into seventeen languages.