Faithful, Finn, and free

the long version

The author searches for a comprehensive anthropology that fully encompasses the dimensions of his own experiences in life. This takes him from a small Finnish ethnic community in far northern Wisconsin to a mining community in northern Minnesota, and later into a personal intellectual and existential search that probes humankind as an aesthetic, psychological and spiritual being. His ultimate discovery is that "[w]e still live under a tribal sun," that is, that we still live as finite, tribal creatures, but that we are faced with a seductive freedom that individually and collectively seeks to transcend this finiteness, for good and often ill. He finds the ultimate answer for this condition in the anthropology of love found in the Christian faith of his fathers which resolves itself in the utter Reality of Truth and Agape, into a life of the charitable surrender to ones neighbors of the gifts of life that he has been given.