Reviews and Recommendations

Joyce Quinlan

Be sure that this new anthology is high on your reading list for 2007. One fascinating reason for the recommendation is that the articles will leave you with an unmistakable conviction that a new human consciousness is alive and well--even flourishing--among us in spite of these dark days of war and anxiety. As one of the contributors, Diarmuid O'Murchu puts it: "We are going forward, lured by the future that the Creative Spirit always opens up for us.... This is not the same as the utopian promise of modern consumerism, on the one hand, and evangelical religion on the other. It is the hope born out of struggle and engagement, sustained by evolutionary imagination, and nourished by communities of resistance and prophetic vision."

Such expressions of trust in the creative evolutionary process of the universe pervade each of the fifty-eight essays, and with an enormous diversity of point of view.

On checking the index of the volume, I discovered that the most frequently used words in the articles (other than evolution itself, were beauty, celebration, creativity, and wonder. To find the repetition of such concepts in a book which explores what God and Life are really all about, emphasizes a new consciousness, shifts one out of the paradigm of extreme individualism, hierarchy, and competition into one of unity, interconnectedness, and compassion. Furthermore, the fifty-eight articles come from states representing the East Coast, West Coast, and Middle America as well as Australia, Ireland, England, Canada, and Africa. This geographical spread lends power to the conviction that the same Spirit, filling all time and space, is moving everywhere to tell us the ancient truth through the New Story of the wholeness of Divinity and Universe. Thomas Berry puts it this way in his interview with Jim Schenk: "The universe is the celebratory experience of the Divine and creation. Everything is here for the same reason, for manifestation and celebration. But the human articulates this...therefore our role is to be spokespersons for the Universe in which the Divine and the human meet.

Not only does this book encompass similar thinking from different cultural areas, but also a great range of types of people responding. I have already quoted from some of the professional, previously published individuals, but there are strong personal experiences recorded by many in less public spheres of activity. Meg Hanrahan, a media producer, writes that we humans are key players in the "ever evolving process of creation. By immersing ourselves in reverence and respect, in awe and wonder...we might hope to fulfill our part in the renewal of creation."

Peggy Logue, a member of the Grail Institute, looking out her window on a rain-soaked morning reflects, ”In the intimate moment or connection with creation, 'God' is. 'God is the light, the dark...the world, the grizzly. 'God is the water, the air...the child, the parent. 'God' is all. Marya Grathwold OSF remarks, "Last night I saw you for the first time.... Now I am seeing you everywhere, the light within the light of each being.... Now I am dancing within the rhythm of your drumming, putting my feet down in soil of the stars and pathways of the immense abyss... What else does a person do upon meting the Source and Mystery of All That Is?" And Mary Brown O.P. says,"...Even if our ignorance and arrogance bring things to ruin here, the energy of life will not be undone. This does not make me work less hard. On the contrary, I feel privileged to participate actively in something wondrous."

The odds are very good that reading this book will give you a legitimate high drive to be more engaged with all of LIFE.

Joyce Quinlan, PhD., was a Benedictiner for 37 years. She has a doctorate in Future Studies from Union Institute University. She was an English professor at Thomas More College in Covington, KY, and a counselor before retiring five years ago. She continues to lead Spiritual Eldering Groups.

Anglican Theological Review
Summer 2007
Volume 89 • Number 3

The word “God” has inspired as much contestation as faith in the modern period, especially in the wake of breathtaking advances in physics and cosmology, not to mention inter-religious conversation. Precious little agreement exists today on what the word “God” means, to whom or what kind of reality it refers, and how that reality ought to or does shape our life. The same things can be said about the word “humanity.” Given what we are learning about the far reaches of space as well as the mysterious mechanisms of quantum physics, who are we in this vastly expanding universe, why are we here, and where are we going?

This eclectic collection of short interviews and excerpts from essays, books and poetry – aptly edited by Jim Schenk – addresses such perennial questions from the work of fifty-two theologians, scientists, “eco-philosophers,” and artists, including Thomas Berry, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Joanna Macy, Sallie McFague, Matthew Fox, and Brian Swimme. Schenk undertook a daunting task in this collection, and he does not always succeed in terms of continuity of theme and style. Yet that too is part of the point of this anthology: we can no longer pretend that the words “God” and “humanity” enjoy a widely shared sense of meaning or import. The ideas and the sensibilities in this anthology do, however, share a common posture toward the word “God”: classical theism, with all its attendant consequences for theology and spirituality, is a relic of the past. As Schenk argues, we now need to consider much more seriously where “theology can go given the cosmology of the day” (p. 14) and especially given humanity’s current and persistent “disconnection from the planet” (p. 17).

Readers will find echoes here of the 1960s’ Death of God movement as well as the New Age spirituality of the 1980s – we are here, writes Marlaina Kreinin, “to give birth to a never-ending dream of the possible” (p. 144). But these contributors are not interested in self-help varieties of spiritual practice. They are concerned instead with making much deeper connections among emerging notions of the divine, ecological sustainability, and human thriving. As Meg Hanrahan suggests, “remembering ourselves as part of nature, as a species on Earth” can empower us to participate more fully in the ongoing, unfolding event or dance of creation (p. 154).

These perspectives should not sound foreign to practitioners of a religious tradition grounded in notions of incarnation. Thus Michael Dowd’s observation could have been just as easily penned by the Archbishop William Temple: “I see the entire universe as the Hand of God – the primary revelation of the divine – and God, the animating Life Force of the Cosmos, embodied or incarnate in matter itself” (p. 55). Mary Coelho likewise turns to contemplative and mystical traditions to retrieve the “radical Christian assertion” about the union of the divine and human in Jesus, an assertion that ought to awaken a deeper awareness of the divine throughout creation itself (p. 115).

The volume concludes with reflections on life after death, which are also grounded in ecological sensibilities as well as contemporary physics. Just as notions of God and divinity are reworked in the wake of classical theism, so also are notions of Heaven, especially in relation to Earth. Even in the face of death, Miriam Brown reminds us, awakening deeper connections to Earth can renew our confidence in that Divine Reality in which we already “live and move and have our being” (p. 226). I imagine this collection as a useful “conversation starter” in congregational education programs or retreats, especially for those curious about traditional faith in relation to contemporary cosmology. For most congregations, these writers would present a challenging and lively introduction to ways of thinking about ancient questions.

Bradley Pace
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary
Evanston, Illinois