While attending the Aspen Ideas Festival, he hiked to the edge of American Lake, pulled out a book of Puritan prayers, and had a transcendent experience buttressed by the appearance of a “little brown creature who looked like a badger.” He eventually realized that he was in love with Snyder and confessed his love to her. With that came a feeling that I was connected by radio waves to all of them-some underlying soul of which we were all a piece.” Brooks’s spiritual momentum was quickening. ![]() They were living souls,” Brooks writes in his new book, “ The Second Mountain.” “Suddenly it seemed like the most vivid part of reality was this: Souls waking up in the morning. “It was like suddenly everything was illuminated, and I became aware of an infinite depth on each of these thousands of people. One morning, passing through Penn Station at rush hour, Brooks was overcome by the feeling that he was moving in a sea of souls-not the hair and legs and sneakers but the moral part. He received, by his own estimation, three hundred gifts of spiritual books, “only one hundred of which were different copies of C. An informal competition opened for David Brooks’s soul. “The foundational fact,” Snyder reminded Brooks, “is you cannot earn your way into a state of grace-this denies grace’s power, and subverts its very definition.” For Brooks, this carried the clarity of revelation, and soon he let it be known, among his acquaintances, that he was experiencing religious curiosity. Brooks was a practicing Jew, if one on the downslope of belief-his wife had converted and then become more Orthodox than he-and Snyder, in elegant memos and correspondence, worked to persuade him that his account of Day’s sense of Christian grace missed the sublime core. His correspondence with a young research assistant, a Christian woman named Anne Snyder, grew intense. He was writing a book called “ The Road to Character,” offering guidance, through biographical case studies, for how a person might engage in moral self-improvement, and two of the chapters made examples of Christian lives: St. ![]() The personal crisis that ensued overlapped with a spiritual one. In 2013, the Times columnist David Brooks, then in his early fifties, divorced his wife of twenty-seven years, Sarah, and moved into an apartment in Washington, D.C.
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