Book: A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life

View more in Virtues & Vocations: Conversations on Character and the Common Good

In A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer reveals the same compassionate intelligence and informed heart that shaped his best-selling books Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach. Here he speaks to our yearning to live undivided lives–lives that are congruent with our inner truth–in a world filled with the forces of fragmentation.


Mapping an inner journey that we take in solitude and in the company of others, Palmer describes a form of community that fits the limits of our active lives. Defining a “circle of trust” as “a space between us that honors the soul,” he shows how people in settings ranging from friendship to organizational life can support each other on the journey toward living “divided no more.”