Myths We Live By

ABSTRACT

Dennis Patrick Slattery’s The Fictions of Our Convictions: Essays on the Cultural Imagination (2023) investigates how beliefs, expressed through personal and cultural stories or myths, construct our self-understanding and worldviews. Part I, comprised of thirteen essays, utilizes his own life story and literary classics such as Homer’s Odyssey, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Melville’s Moby-Dick to reflect on a wide array of themes central to the volume: addiction, healing, imagination, and the power of language to both distort and reveal what is real. Part II provides cultural vignettes that reflect on civic matters pertaining to civility and democracy as well as existential matters such as trust, friendship, and aging. Slattery’s interdisciplinary hermeneutic is deeply informed by the depth psychological perspectives of C. G. Jung and James Hillman and the mythological vision of Joseph Campbell.

KEY WORDS:

• addiction
• aging
• beauty
• belief
• Joseph Campbell
• culture
• culture wars
• death and dying
• civility
• democracy
• education
• healing
• James Hillman
• imagination
• individuation
• innocence
• friendship
• language
• learning
• myth
• mythopoesis
• story
• trust
• truth
• wholeness
• wonder
• writing

Notes

1. For a full account of his sabbatical journey, see Dennis Patrick Slattery, A Pilgrimage Beyond Belief: Spiritual Journeys Through Christian and Buddhist Monasteries of the American West (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick J. Mahaffey

PATRICK J. MAHAFFEY, PhD, is Professor Emeritus, Mythological Studies Program, at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He is the author of Integrative Spirituality: Religious Pluralism, Individuation, and Awakening (Routledge, 2019) as well as essays on Hindu mythos, Buddhist mythos, and self-inquiry in Jungian depth psychology and contemplative yoga. Correspondence: [email protected].