Ethel Marie: How a Minnesota Farm Girl Helped Me to Understand Life, Love, and Human Destiny

In this book, a longtime academician recalls his life and the shaping influence of his mother, a woman of plain origins who gave him insight, by her example, into the timeless wisdom of the world’s great spiritual traditions.

This story, in part, is a memoir of Kelly Nicholson’s youth and subsequent adventures. Beneath its surface lies the enduring question of how we might acquire a sense, amid a world of competing influences, of what life means and where we are ultimately headed. Its thesis is that we gain insight not merely from analytical scholarship but also from our daily flesh and blood encounters with those around us.

Kelly Nicholson is a much-traveled college and university instructor and veteran sportswriter who has taught philosophy and religious studies on three continents for the better part of half a century. He holds degrees and certifications from the University of Washington, Claremont Graduate School, and Cambridge University in England. A former firefighter and amateur boxer, he currently teaches philosophy part-time at Utah Valley University in Orem.