Your Face My Light: Maurice Zundel, the Gospel of Man

Maurice Zundel (1897-1975), Swiss writer, priest and theologian, addresses himself not only to practising believers but to all those who, in a humanity and a Church in crisis, are seeking for a transcendent meaning or purpose to existence. Marginalised by the Catholic Church for his unorthodox, modernist views which present the individual as the source of his own freedom and becoming. Zundel's existential approach to 'being' is complemented by a profound spirituality of interiority and discovery of one's 'person' as the route to true encounter with the 'other'. The 'self' is also the 'creative source' which seeks itself through creative and artistic endeavour. These multiple facets of a theology attuned to the modern world and psyche, combined with a strong ecumenism embracing Islam encountered through long periods in Egypt and Lebanon, have ensured Zundel a huge following. Yet he is hardly known in the English-speaking world. The present book seeks to fill this void. It combines an introduction to Zundel's thinking by reference to his life and person with an analysis of selected extracts from his work translated by the author into English.

The author's career has been devoted to the service of literature and cross-cultural understanding, both as a university teacher and as a writer. She is bilingual and publishes in both English and French. She has published widely in the field of her doctoral research on Mauriac and Bergson, on inter-cultural communication, and on a range of contemporary European novelists. She has been a founder member of various associations and journals in which she has played leadership and editorial roles, most notably, the Association Européenne FranÃ§ois Mauriac which has been a focus of her activity during the last 30 years. It has members in 18 countries and its annual conferences focus on the modern European literary scene. (association europeennefrancoismauriact.blogspot.com/) Her current writing is veering more towards fiction, poetry and memoir, religion and literary aesthetics. She is a great lover of French rural life.