Higher Ground: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost

by Carolyn S. Briggs

Book Overview

A riveting memoir of one woman's immersion into fundamentalist faith, and her decision twenty years later to leave it all behind. Beautifully written and powerfully told, this memoir is a fascinating look at the nature of faith, and the inspiring story of one woman's struggle to find her place in the world. Originally published as This Dark World, this book has been adapted into the screenplay Higher Ground, now a film directed by and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1442214384
• ISBN13: 9781442214385
• Release Date: August 2011
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Insight into Fundamentalism

I found "This Dark World" to be insightful and inspiring. Ms. Briggs presents an interesting, inside-out view of fundamentalist religion. She does this from the perspective of a conversion to fundamentalism, and then a slow but powerful enlightenment as she discovers chinks and inconsistencies in the armor of zealous religious faith.A fast and easy read, this book left several impressions on me. It presented a believable (true, actually) account of how Christian religious fervor can lead otherwise intelligent people to behave irrationally for months or years. Second, it provided an inspiring example of one woman's successful struggles to find herself, her own voice, and finally her independence despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles and obligations.As I watch and listen to recent world news, particularly the events in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other middle-eastern Islamic states, I find myself thinking back to Ms. Brigg's story. She embraced Christianity, while the people cited in the newspapers appear to embrace Islam. But the parallels are striking: young people, difficult lives, and over-arching reliance on strict dogma to guide and justify their actions. The empathy Ms. Briggs evokes for her former plight has helped me to understand, at least in a small way, the susceptibility of people to religious dogma.I whole-heartedly recommend Ms. Briggs' book. I found it interesting, insightful, and, unexpectedly, a useful tool for understanding another side of the human experience.

Love the Cover Art

This book is not anti-God; it's not anti-religion; it's not anti-marriage or even anti-fundamentalism. It is just a woman's story; it's her - Carolyn Briggs' - life story until now, and she tells her story bravely and honestly. Her upbringing is spare and devoid of many things, but the essence of the book is her adult journey. She moves from an existence where others defined her, from a place where she had the smugness and sureness of knowing all the answers, to a much more tenuous existence as a self-defined, autonomous, but still searching human being. I think her journey is inspirational - it could mirror any struggle for self-awareness or self-fulfillment, a struggle that defeats many of us. It did not defeat her. I LIKED this woman.I found it fascinating to enter the world of the "true believer." It is tempting sometimes to believe in God's "orderly universe," tempting to not question anything, to simply have faith and bend to the will of God. But about midbook, when Briggs admits that her "zeal is flagging," I was relieved. Her intellect demanded more than God could provide and her passions demanded more than her husband could provide, and she admitted it! Big sin. These conflicts tore her apart, but she did not shirk from what was painful or difficult - she found the strength to stand alone. Briggs' writing is deft enough to allow moments of humor to balance the angst of her transition - you find yourself pulling for this woman, not only for the changes she is attempting but for the dreams she still holds.

Fascinating true story

This book is deeply fascinating. I've been immersed in its world all night. Couldn't put it down.It's an important book in that it tells an untold story--one woman's odyssey into and out of religious faith. I have never seen nor read such an account elsewhere. In this modern world of multiple religious perspectives, in which religious differences are central to national and international politics, this story is important--it brings us into contact with what is, for most of us, an unfamiliar world; it makes this world come alive with faces and voices.This book has it all. It tells its story with wit and insight, intelligence and poetry and skill. It has real emotional power.I think one of the chief qualities of this book, for which it is to be praised, is the subtlety of the author's own understanding of her experience--she has allowed it to remain complex, allowed the ambiguities to remain--this I think is a personal victory for her, and readers of her book will be rewarded. We are able to appreciate both that she felt something truly beautiful, truly good--loving community, the surrender of the self to that community and to a greater spiritual reality--and also recoil at the self-destructive aspects of blind faith, and the misuse of that faith in her community to dress up human shortcomings--with disastrous results.In short, I would recommend this book highly to anyone. This is the fascinating story of a fascinating life.

Fascinating Insight Into Fundamentalist Thinking

Both my age and the events of recent history have forced me to take a closer look at my own spiritual beliefs. The book, THIS DARK WORLD, by Carolyn Briggs, provided a bridge to both of those concepts simultaneously, while revealing the author's very personal history also. This book is the only book that I have read that has made believable the concept of total immersion into a fundamentalist way of life. I could actually understand how someone of clearly huge intelligence and compassion could enmesh themselves into this way of life. The author's daily routine of prayer, industry, and study seemed as plausible as the fast paced and hectic pursuit of materialistic goals that most of my own generation have devoted themselves to throughout the years of our adulthood. Ms. Briggs provides a very close look at the thought processes of the fundamentalist in general, and yet the revelation of her own experiences is what touches us the most. It has surprisingly large doses of a rather dry humor, while retaining its problematic theme all the same. Her memoir served many purposes for me. I think it would for many of us. There will be those, I am sure, who would believe that Ms. Briggs forsake her spirituality, but I believe that instead she found it.

Beautiful and Powerful

The subtitle of this book is "a memoir of salvation found and lost." After reading the book, I am filled with anything but a sense of loss. I saw it rather as a double-conversion narrative. The narrator's first conversion is indeed a religious one, and she becomes a religious zealot, closing her eyes and taking Kierkegaard?s ?leap of faith.? However, her story doesn?t end there. Blind faith and the pressures of daily living are seldom content to coexist, and the narrator experiences a second, bittersweet awakening... an intellectual one. In many ways, this is a feminist memoir but, this is no Redstockings Manifesto. Instead, Briggs brings to mind the grace and courage of Zora Neale Hurston?s Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God. What Briggs most wants is to, like Janie, find her unique voice. With the publication of this memoir, it seems that she has at last found it.Briggs daringly and honestly tackles the complex issue of faith and doubt. She appears to possess both in great quantities and remains undaunted by the contradiction. Briggs is searching for a god that allows her to serve her/him while exploring and embracing her own humanity... a god who liberates rather than represses? In the end it is unclear whether or not she has found the faith that she is looking for, but I am left with the sense that she will tirelessly continue searching.I read this memoir in one sitting.