God's Beloved

"More than most writers, the Catholic priest Henri Nouwen earned the adjective "beloved" with his penetratingly honest meditations on the Christian life. In this book, Nouwen's Harvard teaching assistant seeks not just to celebrate his friend but also to understand the roots of his spiritual journey. O'Laughlin has a keen sense of Nouwen's uniqueness: "Henri was not living out, nor was he presenting to the world, a universally applicable spiritual program, perhaps because there is no 'universally applicable' spiritual program." He sketches Nouwen's biography, including his childhood in the Netherlands, his frustrating experiences teaching at Yale and Harvard and his final years caring for disabled adults at a religious community in Canada. But the book is less concerned with chronology than sorting out the distinctive gifts that Nouwen brought to his friends and readers. O'Laughlin draws—with somewhat uncritical enthusiasm—on psychological terminology to explore Nouwen's temperament, a