Conversion Works

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In this book, conversion means abandoning a worldview and starting over. Using this definition of conversion, the book examines four works: Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions, Rene Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, Bernard Lonergan’s Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, and Peter Weir’s The Truman Show. The main argument of this book is that all four works contain and induce conversion. That is, all four works feature an individual who abandons a worldview and starts over, and all four works exhort their engager to do the same. This book also explores the works’ requirement of cognitive imitation, wherein a person replicates the mental activities of the individual who has a conversion in the work, and of private engagement, wherein a person reads or views the work while alone. The book concludes with an argument for the educational value of the four works that appropriates Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.