Tremendously interesting and instructive….
— Charles Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, McGill University
Reading the Dream is a unique meditation on poetry, history, religion, and politics from one of the most important poets of our time. It is the result of decades of deep thinking about the fate of poetry in human history as well as the nature of our shared human condition. Its horizon is the meeting of poetical visions with pivotal historical developments in religion and politics, and its arc of arguments bridges East and West as well as the ancient and the modern. In the midst of our current despair over political conflicts and ecological disasters, this book shows us where hope may be found. This is thinking about poetry and history at its most urgent and relevant. It is a theological poetics that we all need, now more than ever. The book has true magnificence.
— Anna Sun, Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Sociology, Duke University, prize-winning author of Confucianism as a World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities
You will be set upon by packs of wild dogs and post-moderns who hate all suggestions that there are universals beneath the flux. But I applaud you. You disdain the boundaries of established fields, at least when they are set up to tell us where we must not tread. Your knowledge is wide, your curiosity boundless.
I honour you for the wide knowledge and the insight that this endeavour required, and I am also impressed by your energy! May this work be widely read and deeply pondered!
— Graeme Macqueen, founder of the McMaster's Centre of Peace Studies
Reading the Dream: A Post-Secular History of Enmindment by Peter Dale Scott is a deeply thought and personally felt study of the key role of pivotal shifts in the ethical evolution of Eastern and Western civilizations. This impressively researched work highlights in detail the enduring development of social, cultural, and spiritual values that underlies the superficial rise and fall of political structures — and provides an inspiring basis of hope for the future of humanity.
— Edwin Bernbaum, author of Sacred Mountains of the World
I’ve been reading through your manuscript with much pleasure and profit. Its poetic vision is so grand I could wish you were doing it in verse--but it often feels anyhow like the high language proper to verse. What you have written is magnificent in itself and we hope influential in the world.
— Gordon Teskey, Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature, author of Delirious Milton