God’s Breath in Man and in Humane Society

About this book

Thomas Lake Harris believed the act of breathing could carry religious meaning far beyond the movement of air. In his writings, breath becomes a sign of divine life entering the person and extending into human society.

Harris's teaching joins inward experience to an ambitious programme of communal transformation. Spiritual discipline, relationships and the organisation of daily life are drawn into one religious vision. Read in the context of his nineteenth-century movement, these ideas show how an intimate bodily experience could become the foundation of a proposed new social order. The scale of that leap is remarkable in itself.