Brother Emmanuel was born in Tours (France) in 1971 and joined in 1991 the Taizé Community, an ecumenical monastery, well-known for its repetitive songs and meditative prayer, that welcomes every year tens of thousands of young adults from all over the world. His field of research is psychology of religion and his work led him to treat the major obstacles that arise on the way to a loving relationship with God: doubts about the existence of a God of love in a broken world; feelings of guilt, secret wounds and hidden fears of God nourished by a real difficulty in believing that we are worthy to be loved; persistent images of a rather distant, frightening, exclusively masculine Divine Being; false oppositions between science and faith, psychology and theology, sexuality and spirituality. Realizing that these main obstacles are due to misrepresentations of God influenced by unconscious psychological projections, he wrote a book that unmasks them and shows that the beauty of God’s love is far greater than our psychological, cultural and theological conditioning has allowed us to see. Published in the USA under the title Love, Imperfectly Known (Continuum, 2011), his research invites us to rediscover aspects of God’s love often disfigured, misunderstood or unexplored, so as to enter into an intensive reciprocal love with God. In 2012, he was invited by many universities and Christian communities throughout the USA to give lectures/presentations/talks on his writings and on contemplative prayer in various cities (Chicago, Indianapolis, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Waco, Austin, San Antonio…).
