Book of Hours

Draws together three aspects of Father Leeâ?Ts life; opera, literature and his life and work as a priest.

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"...finely crafted and deeply moving memoir...his book is redolent with an imagination that is comprehensively catholic and profoundly sacramental. A Book of Hours explores human imagination's heights and depths.... Owen Lee's Book of Hours sings, ultimately, of God's sacramental imagination. He chants a sacrificial liturgy for all seasons." -America, 2/21/05
"How can a memoir whose main action involves travelling by train across Europe to attend opera performances be so exciting? A Book of Hours focuses on a year Father Owen Lee spent teaching at an American college in Rome sometime in the 1950's.... His subject is the power of beauty to place him 'face to face with something, someone, deep within me and at the same time infinitely beyond.'... He illuminates every experience with infinite shades of meaning. His candour is poignant.... But in every facet of this exquisite memoir Father Lee communicates a fertile affirmation of life." -The Wholenote Magazine, 2/05
"With his wonderfully synthetic mind he weaves together his thoughts about classics, opera, composers, conversations with bright, questing students, reflections on his travels, the people he meets, observations on how an atrocity from antiquity connects to the modern, our propensity for repeating rather than learning from the past, strands of thought that continually converse with and enlighten one another. Conversations with his students who seem to tell him absolutely everything and to whom he responds in a way that embraces, challenges, and inspires were particularly intimate and affecting. I was sorry to have reached the last page. Anyone who enjoys Father Lee's spacious way of seeing and integrating experience will enjoy his memoir" - Beth Hart
"Lee's insightful and witty comments on such famous operas as Aida and Zauberflute reveal him to be not just an opera critic but a man of much learning and erudition, "an authentically humanist Christian soul" as one reviewer put it."-Willard Manus, What's Up, April 2007
-Mention. Mojo/ May 1, 2007
"Theological arguments, ethical dilemmas, and discussions with colleagues and students about Homer, Horace, Sappho, and Wagner mix with lively descriptions of Rome. [Lee] illuminates every experience with infinite shades of meaning....in every facet of this exquisite memoir Father Lee communicates a fertile affirmation of life." ---Pamela Margles, Wholenote, February 1, 2005
"...a wonderful book which will give enormous pleasure to any person who still believes in the inherited high culture of the West.... His wonderful description of the architectural differences between the domes of the Pantheon and Borromini's St. Yvo is as brilliant a lecture on art history as I have ever read.... His memoir is the testimony of a kind of Christian humanist who is a rarity today." -Commonweal, December 3, 2004
"A Book of Hours is an aesthetic feast, lyrically offered. But it is also a pilgrim's journey, an odyssey of an authentically humanist Christian soul."-Worship
"Opera, literature, priesthood, and teaching; these four great loves of Father Owen Lee are woven together into a vivid tapestry...[a] vivid, poignant personal memoir"   "In my judgement it is authentiticity of a life offered as a prayer - offered in all its range of eros, faith and beauty - that marks this work and renders it worthy"