God Hunger: Discovering the Mystic in all of us

At the root of all our longing is a profound hunger for God. It's a hunger that can't be satisfied with feel-good recipes or pious platitudes. It is, in reality, the same hunger that has for centuries motivated the world's great spiritual teachers, a hunger only God can fill.

Here is a book that takes this God hunger seriously by providing 50 challenging experiences for the soul built around the core spiritual insights of ten great Western mystics (Christian, Jewish, and Islamic).

Crossing centuries and traditions, it takes the searcher on a journey of discovery of the very best that Western spirituality has to offer. It leads the reader on an accessible path from the Islamic poet Rumi in the 13th century to the monk an mystic Thomas Merton in the 20th, from Gregory of Nyssa in the 4th century to the Kaballah in the 12th, and on to C.S. Lewis and Evelyn Underhill, mystics of our time.

About the Author:

Born in 1932, John Kirvan grew up in near poverty in a small Canadian town where his father earned six dollars a week as a truck driver. Flying through eight grades in six years, Kirvan spent his teenage years writing newspaper columns about Big Bands and the birth of jazz -- all the while working in a barbershop frequently raided as a bookie joint.

Never graduating from high school, Kirvan entered the seminary and managed to get an M.A. in religious studies and an M.S. in Library Science at the Catholic University of America. While at the University, he started a publishing agency -- the Paulist Writers Bureau.

Ordained in 1958, Kirvan became a seminary professor and began to write about theology and the arts in his spare time. That hobby led to regular appearances on NBC's Catholic Hour, and a program called Religion and the Arts.

A chaplain at Wayne State University in Detroit from 1963-1968, Kirvan was a leader for students who added religious restlessness to their political concerns. In between entertaining the FBI, who raided his campus facility every time he changed the locks, Kirvan wrote about his experience with his students in the bestselling book Restless Believers.

In 1974 Kirvan left the priesthood to devote his energies to all aspects of publishing, working with his own company and later with Winston Press and C.R. Gibson.

In the 1980s, Kirvan took a break from the publishing business to run a California art gallery specializing in glass and ceramics. Calling this period "the most important in my life," Kirvan was finally able to separate the spiritual needs of ordinary folks from institutional agendas. Growing intensely aware of the enormous spiritual hunger that had become part of a generation that knew much about pain and suffering, death and dying, Kirvan developed a dozen books on the mystics in the series 30 Days With a Great Spiritual Teacher.

Currently, Kirvan is the director of product development for Sorin Books. He lives in southern California.