Private Excavations: Exploring the Roots of Dogma (Signed)

In Private Excavations, South African author David Robbins explores the historical roots and contemporary impact of religious fundamentalism - the archetypal one-truth perception of the world. This is essentially a travel book as the author visits those parts of Germany, Sweden and Norway that spawned fundamentalist Christianity in its earliest form (Pietism), as well as the Pietist-inspired circumstances and convictions that brought his Scandinavian forebears as missionaries to the eastern seaboard of South Africa.

The urge to make such explorations first stirred in him during the deep political disturbances that wracked Natal-KwaZulu in the late 1980s. Robbins' investigations are given depth and perspective by his interest in the lives of two prominent Scandinavians (playwright August Strindberg and artist Edvard Munch) But it is the author's pursuit of his own ancestors - his private excavations - that remain the central focus of this work; and it is this personal intent that lends an intimacy and penetration to his insights into an indisputably universal theme.