Modern
More recently, science fiction author Philip K. Dick reportedly had a theophany on 3 February 1974, which was to become the later basis for his semi-biographic works Valis (1981) and the posthumous Radio Free Albemuth (1985).
In 1977, a man, in France, Michel Potay testified he witnessed five theophanies. He published the text he says he received from God in The Book, second part of The Revelation of Ares.
If all cases of "divine disclosure" through different media, agencies, and senses of human bodies alone, were, as stated at the opening of this article, included in the count, there are a large number of modern cases which have been rendered into print, film, and otherwise conveyed to broad publics. Some cases have become popular books and media, including:
- A Course in Miracles which is attested as divinely channeled
- The Attentive Heart: Conversations with Trees in which the spirits contacted are resident in species not observed to speak in the ordinary biophysical sense of human speech
These instances are distinguished from cases in which divine encounters are explicitly considered fictional by the author, a frequent motif in speculative fiction such as in Julian May's Galactic Milieu Series.
Read more about this topic: Theophany
Famous quotes containing the word modern:
“The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)