Thomas Moore: Thank you, Dolores, for agreeing to a written interview. When I see oral interviews I’ve done, printed up in the press, I wonder what language I’m speaking. My Detroit dialect gets in the way. I’ll try to do better with this format. .

1. I tried for over a year to come up with a title for The Soul’s Religion. This one I used for an article published in Parabola Magazine, but I’m not happy with it as a title. It says what the book is about, but it doesn’t have a zing. Nevertheless, I feel the book is pretty good. I’ve been thinking about its themes most of my life, and I am relieved now to get them in book form.

2. My working title for the book was "Deep Spirit". I wanted to get spirituality out of the heights and into the depths. Not that I don’t appreciate the sublime, but I like to speak for the ordinary and the profoundly invisible. I put the word profound in the subtitle for that reason, though I don’t like the sound of the adverb.

3. Yes, I’m a Catholic. In print I have called myself a deep Catholic, an original Catholic, and a Zen Catholic. I like Emerson’s observation that every church has a membership of one. No one else is a Catholic the way I am, thank God. My wife says my spirituality is invisible. Hers is quite out in the open. My Catholicism is quite substantial, but it has no relation to the kind promoted in Rome.

4. I don’t agree. I don’t think American society as such is religious. Our people individually are generally very religious. Religions flourish in America, but all our institutions-government, business, education- act as though we were secularists. We trust rationalism and science. More than trust, we believe in them, and at times they take the place of religion. I do wish we could discover that religion has a soul and can be lived from the soul, that we would live the values we preach and embody the image we present to the world. Then we might become a religious nation-thoughtful, trusting, and capable of being a compassionate member of the world community.

5. I write for an audience living 150 years from now. I’m an avid reader of the New England writers Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Fuller, Hawthorne, and Melville. When I write, I think of someone reading my books the way I read these ancestors, at a distance. I hope that, removed from the narcissism of our time, they might see that I’m not a self-help author but more like Emerson and his friends, simple companions of the muse.

6. I try not to offer a message. I know that my writing has its own moralism and norms, but I try not to preach and moralize. My new publisher said he’d like to present my new books as intelligent self-help. I can live with that. But I don’t set out consciously to help my readers. I’m happy to hear that my books have helped someone, but I suspect that if I were to see myself as helping, the quality of my writing would diminish.

7. I am not trying to achieve anything with this book. I hope people read it and enjoy it. I’ve written it the best I can, but it has its imperfections. The next book will be perfect.

8. I get up around 7, have a light breakfast, and take the children to school. I come home, do some laundry, and take out the garbage. Then I play the piano for about forty-five minutes, usually Bach, Mozart, Haydn, or Debussy. I might work on some choral arrangements. Then I try to write. In the afternoon I deal with business-correspondence, writing assignments, and interviews. Usually I have a pile of manuscripts to review from authors and publishers. In the evening I tell my daughter stories that I make up. Then, when the house is quiet, I write for an hour or two. To foster inspiration, I vary my habits, and I feel lucky if in a day I find three hours in which to write.

9. Yes, I spent a year with my family recently in Ireland. I studied in the North in my late teens and have always loved the place. The Irish are incredibly gifted with language, humor, a social conscience, music, religion, and general intelligence. I’ve been trying to put together a video on what the Irish have to offer the world today. I love doing television, but I find it difficult to get backing and to produce the quality of program I aim for.

10. I had a happy childhood. I grew up in Detroit in a wonderfully warm family. The first six years were bliss. I just wanted to be a child. But then I went to school and hated it. At thirteen I left home to pursue the priesthood. I was homesick for thirteen years, but I got a lot out of the experience. Those years are still the basis of my life.

12. The central influences on my thinking and writing are John Dominic Crossan, who helped me deliteralize the New Testament; Teilhard de Chardin, who grounded spirit in natural evolution; Paul Tillich, who reconnected religion and culture; Abraham Maslow, who kept me aiming high; C. G. Jung, who transforms psychology into religion before your eyes; James Hillman, whose brilliant imagination has inspired me for thirty years; and Anne Sexton, who teaches me how to join the primitive passions with the religious sublime.

13. No. I like to be involved in the marketing of my books, but I’m not very sociable. Book tours are full of pleasures and pains. I treasure my solitude. I like good hotels. I enjoy strolling through a beautiful, lively shopping mall. I meditate only through my senses. You could call it sensuous meditation, I guess. I eat all kinds of food, except that I seem to be allergic to onions and garlic. A pity. I love ordinary Monday mornings. I love lying in the bed next to my daughter at night, telling her a story that comes to me in the dark. I love being on Cape Cod with my wife and family. I love being in Ireland. I’d like to live there for half the year. I enjoy trying to speak Italian in Italy.

14. My work is my therapy and my spiritual practice. I learned in the monastery that work is prayer. I still believe that. I don’t think anyone should do any work that doesn’t make a positive contribution to community. That is transcendence and the ground of religion. I don’t like the phrase, "socially responsible business" because every business should be socially responsible. .

15. I don’t think much about dying. Every day brings its mortifications, a word that could be translated "making your death". The best way I know to die well is to live well and not to be taken in by the anxieties of the culture around you. Everywhere you look there are signs of the eternal. That gives me hope and the sense that there is some kind of resurrection in store for all this life. I often say to myself, You put me here for some odd reason, and for some odd reason You will take me away. I’ll try to go out with the same combination of eagerness and resistance with which I came in.