This Hardcover Book item from Knopf was reviewed on 14-Oct-2008. Search ISBN:0307268276 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession Reference Book. Classifications : Authors Arts & Literature Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books Religious Leaders & Notable People Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books Memoirs Biographies & Memoirs Subjects Books Women Specific Group . Click the following link to view the cover of Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession. Related topics: Authors. Arts & Literature. Subjects. Books. Religious. Subjects. Books. Memoirs. Subjects. Books. requestid: c5f00fb2-bb4c-49a3-aacc-4fe1cc9076b0
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1) Hardcover Book Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Knopf. I´m a huge fan of all of Anne Rice´s books. When I heard that she was wrote a spiritual memoir I ordered it right away. I wasn´t disappointed; and I ended up staying up half the night so I could finish the book, I couldn´t put it down! Her descriptions of her early spiritual experiences at Church were beautiful and almost brought me to tears. Thank you for sharing your story!¤ 2) Hardcover Book Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Knopf. How can a Berkley-educated intellectual who has achieved fame by writing blood and gore novels about vampires return to Catholicism after 38 years of being a proclaimed atheist? I had to find out!
Anne Rice´s childhood experience of the Catholic religion was similar to mine: religion was present in all aspects of our lives and it felt good. When she wrote about her response to the rich symbolism of her religion as a child attending Mass at the magnificent cathedrals of New Orleans in the 1940s, I remembered how I felt when attending my little church in Wisconsin, also a beautiful place, full of statues and stained-glass windows and symbolic art that told magnificent stories.
When Rice wrote about how she then, as an adult, abandoned the church and God to become a proclaimed atheist, I connected to the empty feelings she described so creatively. As an adult, I have also abandoned the church, but not as an atheist.
I couldn´t connect with Rice´s claim that her vampire books were an important part of her search for her lost god. However, I was in awe of her complex mind as she wrote about this relationship and her atheism. "When people refer to me as a ´prodigal daughter´ because I have given up writing ´about vampires and witches,´ I am confused," she writes. "I feel no guilt whatsoever for anything I ever wrote. The sincerity of my writings removes them completely from what I hold to be sin. I also feel no real contrition for my years as an atheist, because my departure from the church was not only painful, but also completely sincere."
Rice begins her memoir by saying that it is about faith and that the heart is absolutely essential to faith. Her elaboration of this theme was important, as she confesses that her greatest challenge of all has been to love: "All that gossip, all that criticism, all that spitefulness, all that meanness, all the verbal sparring, all that anger--all that failure to love."
I was deeply curious to see how Rice reasons her way through the modern-day controversies within the Catholic Church. She writes: "I hadn´t thought it radical, for instance, for a deeply orthodox Catholic to hope for the eventual ordination of women. Or for a Catholic to believe that our gay Christian brothers and sisters would soon be accepted into the fold."
Rice has recently published two books about Jesus: Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and The Road to Cana. I will read these books and feel enormous gratitude to Anne Rice for having written them, as well as her intimate memoir about her search for God.
by Donna Van Straten Remmert
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
¤ 3) Hardcover Book Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Knopf. How many reading this will find it describing their own journey? Certainly any Catholic who can remember before the revolution in the 1970´s will be delighted to recall the way it once was. Anne describes a flourishing Catholic community of the 50´s and 60´s, the chants and the statues, the stations of the cross,and the nuns who were "perceived as Brides of Christ in their purity and single-minded devotion" (p 48).
And then came the upheavals--the loss of so many of those nuns, the people who fell away, the generation in disarray. Painfully, Anne tells that her mother had died an alcoholic. Her father remarried, this time to a Baptist, and the whole nature of her family was changed.
Anne went to college just about this time, and fell away. She calls those atheist years "bleak years, years without God" (p 97) It was difficult to be chaste, and she was pummeled with new ideas.
The problem with leaving the church is that doubts keep tapping you on the shoulder. Anne recounts that as she studied history for her book "the more my atheism became shaky. History, as well as Creation, was talking to me about God...In particular, the survival of the Jews..there was no convincing sociological or economic explanation (p148).
She came back much more slowly and painfully than when she fell away. She watched Mass on EWTN and longed for the Eucharist. She recalled doing works of mercy in the Legion of Mary.
She knew she "was privy to a remembered devotion and a wisdom that informed it, and had never let me forget it over all those years" (p 107). She decided to write for the Lord. "Within weeks...my husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and within four and one-half months he was dead" (p 207).
An amazing, touching journey that should be widely read.
¤ 4) Hardcover Book Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Knopf. I have not read Anne Rice´s fiction, but I am a fan of spiritual memoirs. I read this one as soon as I could get my hands on it. As an introduction to Rice´s work, it is surprising. I had assumed she was a pulp writer, but she is actually quite gifted. She re-creates her New Orleans childhood in an evocative and vivid way. Her descriptions of Catholicism are rich and filled with mystery. Her journey out of faith, and back to it, is a compelling one. I found her quite relatable, something I would not have expected. She has many interesting things to say about faith, gender, and education. Themes that don´t immediately seem connected weave together in a persuasive way. God is in the details, after all. This is a good read, whether or not you are a fan of Anne Rice´s fiction.¤ 5) Hardcover Book Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Knopf. In CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS: A SPIRITUAL CONFESSION, Anne Rice relates her formative, quite mystical years in the Catholic Church, her thirty-eight adult years as an avowed atheist, and her return beginning in December of 1998. Rice´s childhood with God and Church are principally remembered through a filter of beauty: the beauty of the Latin Mass, the ornate church interiors, the exterior architecture of the old homes and public buildings in New Orleans during the ´40s and ´50s, art, and flowers and majestic trees. Her early desire to devote her life to God as a priest (until she discovered the impossibility of that) or as a nun, gradually dissipated in the common late-teen bid for independence and a "wider" view of the world. Rice was married for forty-one years to poet/artist Stan Rice, and for decades she was content in their mutual aversion to things of God. Still, four years before her husband died, she felt a resurgence of faith and a desire to commit again to Catholicism. She returned to a Church with an English Mass, unfamiliar songs, and many cultural and moral stresses.
Some passages convey Rice´s early awe with lovely cadence: "Even in winter the air was moist, so that the world itself seemed to be pulsing around us, enfolding us, holding us as we moved through it." Others directly describe her era of rejection: "Atheism was reality, and one could not turn away from that reality into a cowardly embrace of religion which one knew to be false." And finally she says, "I will never leave Him again...."
CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS reads as if Rice were sitting across and leisurely telling her story. It meanders. It repeats. It pays out in unexpected movements, skipping some character building moments because they are too painful for the author and dwelling on other thoughts perhaps inordinately. The memoir, despite its zigzag train-of-thought narrative and sometimes less-than-expected coverage of topics, does provide an intriguing window into Rice´s spiritual evolution, including her shift from writing about vampires and the like to being "a writer consecrated to Christ," although more material about her writing motivations would have been welcome.
Generally, for anyone interested in Anne Rice and how she interprets the world, CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS is an eye-opening read containing ascertained revelations of beauty and wisdom.
¤ 6) Hardcover Book Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession by Knopf. In 2005, Anne Rice startled her readers with her novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, and by revealing that, after years as an atheist, she had returned to her Catholic faith.
Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana followed.
And now, in her powerful and haunting memoir, Rice tells the story of the spiritual transformation that produced a complete change in her literary goals.
She begins with her girlhood in New Orleans as the devout child in a deeply religious Irish Catholic family. She describes how, as she grew up, she lost her belief in God, but not her desire for a meaningful life.
She writes about her years in radical Berkeley, where her career as a novelist began with the publication of Interview with the Vampire, soon to be followed by more novels about otherworldly beings, about the realms of good and evil, love and alienation, pageantry and ritual, each reflecting aspects of her often agonizing moral quest.
She writes about loss and tragedy (her mother’s drinking; the death of her daughter and, later, her beloved husband, Stan Rice); about new joys; about the birth of her son, Christopher; about the family’s return in 1988 to the city of New Orleans, the city that inspired so much of her work. She tells how after an adult lifetime of questioning, she experienced the intense conversion and consecration to Christ that lie behind her most recent novels.
For her readers old and new, this book explores her continuing interior pilgrimage. ¤Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 11-Nov-2008, 03072682769780307268273, 760-300-900-100-390-850-370-221-8 
Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession, Book, Image © Knopf
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