The Responsible Party

Speak My Soul addresses the challenges, strivings, aspirations, anxieties, and perplexities of the human condition. The author’s prose form is stylistically free. Characteristically, several of his poems are composed with meticulous attention to rhyming tendencies, while at other times he just lets lines flow as they come to birth in his soul. He tries to locate liberating speech-acts that are able to resonate intimately, from a universal standpoint, with readers of his prose. The book’s four-part organization is meant to take readers along on a reflective odyssey through a web of lived-experiences. The idea of the self is the foundational thought and accordingly becomes the core preoccupation of Part One of the text. What is there about personal identity that captivates our imagination to such a degree that we want to talk about ourselves? We aren’t solitary souls wandering this earth. Part Two sets its sights upon the presence of others within the zones of our activities. We are a global family of thinking, connected living human beings. In a sort of paradoxical sense, we can come to know ourselves better when we are self-consciously aware of how we are gazed upon by others. Part Three turns to a vertical gaze heavenward. The author seeks to place into the foreground the believer’s earthly pilgrimage. What exactly is the point of this spiritual conversion that persuades us of an ultimate other-worldly citizenship? The writer is a practicing professional philosopher. He confirms his love for philosophy by sharing pearls of his familiarity with wisdom’s terrains –the multi-faceted adventures of the life of the mind. He does, however, reckon with the limitations of a thoroughgoing naturalistic philosophical temperament. His consciousness of the human condition and of the life world at large is informed by larger cosmic considerations–an eternalistic point of view Vanterpool speaks of as “transcendism “. Vanterpool openly meditates upon the walk of faith as the center piece of a life that is lived well and more completely. The tenets of natural reason fall short in this regard.