Safe Haven explores the meanings of sanctuary as it has evolved through history. Sanctuary is a beautiful concept, philosophically rich, culturally intriguing and evocative of so much we cherish: protection, safety, contemplation and solitude.

As an often-humorous account of Larry Gaudet’s adventures with his family in their seaside home in Nova Scotia, Safe Haven approaches sanctuary as an elusive privilege in these pathologically networked, multi-tasking times. It asks fundamental questions about why we seek sanctuary: To escape our situation in life? To recover lost dreams?  To have secrets revealed that will make us better people?

Sanctuary is also, Gaudet argues, a necessary pre-condition for moral engagement in a culture that has become unhinged because of speed lust, technology and media addiction. Offered as provocation to the view of sanctuary as just another word for escape, as an aesthetic romp or consumer indulgence, Safe Haven explores the diverse meanings of sanctuary embodied in the ruined shrines of ancient Greece, the frozen vistas and forlorn social realities in the Canadian North, and a tragedy often neglected in the history of Nova Scotia: the ethnic cleansing in the 1750s of the French Acadians – Gaudet’s ancestral family.