Holy Clues

An unlikely yet utterly engaging new take on the world's greatest detective: Sherlock Holmes as spiritual guide and master, whose Zen-like techniques of awareness and observation provide religious insight for the modern, skeptical searcher. Inspired by Holmes's comment to Dr. Watson ("You see but you do not observe"), Stephen Kendrick examines the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle to uncover the religious and metaphysical lessons they offer. Reading detective fiction as religious parable, Kendrick shows that the methods of investigation used in solving crime - particularly that of careful observation, what Buddhism calls "Bare Attention" - are the same methods that yield religious insight when applied to the world and the human heart. A spiritual seeker is a detective of the sacred, and so the lessons of detection - that nothing is insignificant, that you must notice what you see, that the bizarre is not necessarily the mysterious, that you should never presume anything - are also instructions in how to become attuned to the mystery of life and of God.