Fee Download Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding
We share you additionally the way to get this book Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding without visiting the book establishment. You could remain to check out the link that we supply as well as ready to download and install Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding When many individuals are active to look for fro in the book establishment, you are quite easy to download the Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding right here. So, exactly what else you will opt for? Take the inspiration right here! It is not just giving the best book Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding but also the appropriate book collections. Here we constantly provide you the most effective and most convenient method.
Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding
Fee Download Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding
Find out the technique of doing something from lots of sources. Among them is this book entitle Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding It is an effectively understood book Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding that can be recommendation to read now. This advised book is one of the all fantastic Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding compilations that are in this website. You will likewise discover other title as well as motifs from various authors to browse here.
When some individuals taking a look at you while reading Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding, you might feel so pleased. Yet, instead of other people feels you should instil in on your own that you are reading Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding not due to that factors. Reading this Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding will provide you more than people admire. It will certainly overview of know greater than individuals looking at you. Even now, there are numerous resources to discovering, reading a book Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding still comes to be the first choice as an excellent way.
Why must be reading Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding Once again, it will depend upon how you really feel and think about it. It is certainly that one of the benefit to take when reading this Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding; you could take a lot more lessons directly. Also you have not undergone it in your life; you can gain the encounter by reading Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding And also now, we will present you with the on-line book Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding in this internet site.
What sort of book Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding you will like to? Currently, you will certainly not take the published book. It is your time to get soft documents book Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding instead the printed papers. You could appreciate this soft data Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding in any time you expect. Even it remains in anticipated area as the various other do, you can check out the book Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding in your gadget. Or if you really want a lot more, you can read on your computer or laptop to obtain complete screen leading. Juts discover it here by downloading and install the soft file Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide For Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside The Church (Walking Together, Finding in web link web page.
This accessible guide to a meaningful spiritual life is a salve for your soul. It reinterprets traditional religious teachings central to the Christian faith—God, Jesus, faith, prayer, morality and more—in ways that connect with people who have outgrown the beliefs and devotional practices that once made sense to them. It helps you find new ways to understand and relate to traditional, narrowly defined Christian “truths” that honor their full spiritual power and scope, and opens your mind and heart to the full impact of Christian teachings.
- Sales Rank: #851894 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-03-28
- Released on: 2013-04-01
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
Former Catholic priest Stella wants spiritual seekers to realize that God is in each of them, and if that sounds like the Quaker concept of the inner light, so be it. That it also suggests divine immanence, shorn of its orthodox confinement to the Incarnation but also free from pantheism, is implicit throughout this fluent, compelling guide. What religion in the title means also goes unstated, but the text inferentially confirms that the institutional church and its dogmas constitute most of what Stella advises seekers to go beyond to find God. Find but not become, for God is not a person. Indeed, as a person, God is not dead but never lived. In chapters provocatively titled to open up that conception of God—“From Belief to Faith,” “Jesus: The Way, or in the Way?,” “Morality as Right Relationship,” “What Problem of Evil?,” “Church with a Mission, Mission with a Church”—Stella exposes how, in our time, anthropomorphizing God prevents the fuller life that Christianity, in particular, promises believers. Exceptionally cogent spiritual guidance. --Ray Olson
Review
So begins the Rev. Canon Marianne Wells Borg's Foreword to Tom Stella's book: Finding God Beyond Religion. Drawing on this poem by Amichai, Borg explains, "Tom Stella has been moved, shaped, liberated by 'doubts and loves'."
A Christian author who champions doubt? Here’s why Borg’s insight is so important: Millions of men and women are coming to appreciate the value of doubt in their spiritual lives. Of course, some religious traditions value doubt more than others. The full spectrum of Judaism, for example, runs from ultra-orthodox through secular humanist congregations―Jews who believe that the entity we have traditionally called "God" is really the enlightened spirit of humanity. In Buddhism, as the Dalai Lama regularly explains, the traditional Western concept of God is irrelevant to the Buddhist search for compassion and enlightenment. Sufis and other mystics value doubt.
To clarify his message, Tom Stella is not an atheist. In fact, you’ll find in today’s interview with Read The Spirit Editor David Crumm that Tom considers himself a Christian. But, he also describes his concept of God, now, as a powerful sense of a Spirit within the world and within all of us. He says his theology is much like that of retired Bishop John Spong, who we also interviewed recently. Stella’s opening lines in this book quote the Muslim-Sufi mystic Rumi inviting "us to leave behind the narrow notion of religion understood as moral teachings and to enter the field where spiritual seekers gather." That “field” does not try to impose traditional doctrines, Stella explains.
Many religious writers scoff at people who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” But, Tom Stella is a stalwart friend of such seekers. He has become a spiritual counselor to the Nones―the growing minority of Americans who decline to give pollsters a religious affiliation and, instead, respond: “None.” Read The Spirit earlier took a close look at the Rise of the Nones. Sociologist Dr. Wayne Baker, creator of the Our Values project, also has reported on the Nones.
For much of his adult life, Tom Stella served as a Catholic priest. Now, he has left his religious order. As you can learn from Tom’s homepage, he is a spiritual director, counselor, hospice chaplain and author. He has become a sage of the Rockies―a wise teacher drawing from West and East to help men and women from his home base in Colorado Springs.
Highlights of Our Interview with Tom Stella on Finding God Beyond Religion
DAVID CRUMM: You don’t like that label―”Nones.” Instead, you use a phrase that I like, too: “unorthodox believers.” Explain what you mean by that.
TOM STELLA: These are people who are not being fed by the traditional church. Yet, some of the healthiest religious people I know are unorthodox believers. They wouldn’t call themselves “religious” necessarily. Many of the unorthodox believers I have encountered do believe that there is a communion with the divinity, although they are likely to see this divinity as a communion with the spirit of humanity. The term “unorthodox believer” covers a lot of ground―it’s a big umbrella. I’m saying in this book that it’s important for traditional religious groups not to just write off these folks as heretics or atheists. These folks are spiritually hungry. They’re grappling with―and many of them longing for―ways to relate to the larger community.
DAVID: There’s an unfortunate stereotype floating around that “spiritual seekers” are somehow self-centered dilettantes. They’re too soft for real religion and prefer selfish feel-good experiences. That’s essentially what Rabbi David Wolpe said in TIME magazine this spring. We just discussed the Wolpe commentary in a recent interview with Ram Dass. In sharp contrast, you say that the spiritual-but-not-religious path takes a great deal of courage. Some folks may, indeed, be using that line to avoid the whole subject. But for many people, you’re saying, this phrase describes taking a courageous dive into the deep end of the religious pool, right?
TOM: Our culture has developed a very cynical take on these folks. People discount them by describing them as just wanting fuzzy, self-centered stuff. That’s an unfair stereotype. In my experience, folks who’ve chosen to walk this path want a faith that has integrity. Now, we don’t want to stereotype traditionally religious people, either. But I can say this: It’s easier in our culture to go the traditional route of membership and practice than it is to walk the spiritual pathway.
Jack Spong says that people go to religion for safety, not for truth. I think it’s very courageous for people to walk outside of the traditional, institutional paths. People who choose this path can find themselves separated from members of their own family, as relatives learn what traditional beliefs they may have left behind. In the last chapter of my book, I write about so-called “Cafeteria Catholics,” a stereotype of Catholics who like to choose which beliefs they will follow. The institutional Catholic Church wants to write them off. I say: No, these people are trying to work out what they can claim with integrity. I think Jesus was probably regarded as a Cafeteria Jew in his day, which is why he encountered so much friction from the religious officials of his day.
TOM STELLA: 'This can blow up old assumptions’
DAVID: At Read The Spirit, we have published a number of interviews with Bible scholar Marcus Borg―the husband of Marianne Borg, who wrote your Foreword―and Marcus often talks about this problem of conflict within organized religion over what people truly believe, and things the denominations tell them to believe. You’re a fan of Spong’s writing, too, and Spong frequently talks about this problem: Many organized religious groups insist on doctrines that millions have a hard time believing. In your research for this book, what would you say are some of the toughest barriers to belief today?
TOM: Doctrines about Jesus are a barrier, which Marcus also addresses in his books. I’m talking about what we could call High Christology―Jesus descended from above, born of a virgin, died for our sins, and so on. Today, a lot of people who want to have a life of faith say, “I can’t go there anymore.” They may say, “I once reveled in those traditional beliefs, but I just can’t believe that way anymore.” I’m talking about those teachings that give us a dualistic sense of life―that there is this world and then God is somewhere else. God is this anthropomorphic Father, a Guy in the Sky who sometimes decides to intervene. For a lot of people, that notion just doesn’t make sense anymore. When people describe this problem to me, they’ll say: “My life experience tells me this isn’t so.” A lot of people have prayed for someone to recover from a life-threatening illness―for the Guy in the Sky to step in and change the world with a miracle. When that doesn’t happen, this can blow up old assumptions about faith.
DAVID: So, are you an atheist? Turning to Wikipedia, the term “atheist” means “the rejection of belief in the existence of deities.” Is that you?
TOM: You might say that I am non-theistic. I believe in “God,” but my definition of “God” is different than what you’ll find in most churches. I go into this more in my earlier book, A Faith Worth Believing: Finding New Life Beyond the Rules of Religion. I don’t believe that there is a God who is a separate entity out there
somewhere―a Guy in the Sky. I don’t believe the word “God” refers to someone. It refers, I would say, to the spiritual essence of reality and creation. What I am describing, I think, is very similar to what Jack Spong writes and teaches, except that he often comes across as somewhat strident. My work is softer.
DAVID: Yes, I’ve read most of Spong’s books and have known him for nearly 30 years and, you’re right: He deliberately remained within the Christian church, as a bishop, and so came across as very controversial and often as strident―an outspoken prophetic voice within the church. You’ve chosen a different path. You left your religious order and you’re working with folks who also are outside of organized religion. I agree: Your book is pastoral, both for people inside and outside of churches, now.
TOM: I wouldn’t choose to call myself more pastoral than Jack Spong. I would say that my perspective is more contemplative. Thomas Merton has been a big influence on me.
DAVID: Let me push you further. Jack argues strongly that he remains a Christian. How about you? Do you use that term to describe yourself?
TOM: Yes, I would say that I am Christian, because I see the person of Jesus as someone who is a revelation of the truth of this non-theistic God immanence, this God closeness, this Oneness. Jesus is someone who woke up to the truth of his own divinity and surrendered to that to a degree that most people don’t ever achieve. Now, at the same time, I would not say that Jesus is the one and only incarnation of God. I do think that―while Christians have taken the idea of incarnation seriously for 2,000 years―we’ve forgotten to take it personally. The term incarnation applies to Jesus, but it also applies to all of us. We are the enfleshment of the divine.
TOM STELLA: Prayer, T.S. Eliot and Waking Up
DAVID: So, a lot of readers will ask: Where does that leave prayer? You just referred to Thomas Merton as a major influence in your life. Throughout your book, readers will encounter a number of famous Christian mystics, including the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. We just talked about the revival of Hopkins’s poetry in an interview with Richard Rohr. You’re a spiritual director―an advocate of prayer. Yet, in your book, you point out the obvious question: “If we’re not sure there’s a God out there, then what’s the point?” That’s a question a woman asks you in the book. So, what do you say?
TOM: I’m trying to say that prayer is a lot bigger than we have been taught. I was taught that I was praying when I intended to pray and thought I was praying―and I was engaged either in a communal setting or some other formal setting of prayer. Prayer was confined to those settings and formats. But, in the New Testament, Paul teaches us to pray without ceasing. What does that mean? He’s inviting us to see that prayer is a lot bigger than we can imagine.
And, I am trying to say that life can be so much richer when we recognize that the living of it can be considered a prayer. Life is an encounter with the divine, embodied in everyday ordinary creation, if we are fully present and aware of this. Prayer can become something much more pervasive in our lives, almost indecipherable from the way we move through life itself. You may have seen this in the lives of people who have truly given over their lives to these truths. Think of the way St. Francis walked through life. People can come to a realization that every piece of the earth is holy ground. That’s where we get into contemplative sensitivity. It’s not just another way of defining and teaching prayer―this is about realizing that prayer is an entirely different sensitivity to life.
DAVID: I have to ask you, in this regard, about your choice of T.S. Eliot and a quote from his Four Quartets. Personally, I’m struck by how often Eliot is turning up in contemporary Catholic writing, these days. We published a review of a remarkable book, collecting contemporary Catholic writers under a title that also is taken from Eliot’s Four Quartets, the phrase “Not Less Than Everything.” Eliot kept asking: How can anyone who cares about humanity keep going in such tragic times? His answer was as long and complex as the 50 pages of the Four Quartets. But it involves making a total personal commitment to life. Or, as Eliot puts it―a commitment “costing not less than everything.”
In your book, you quote four lines that come just before that famous phrase about the cost. You quote this:
We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
Tell us why you chose those lines.
TOM: Ultimately, this is all about waking up. That’s what the spiritual life is all about―recognizing the fullness of where we are and where we’ve been. It’s enlightenment. William Wordsworth put it this way in his Ode, Intimations of Immortality:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
In a sense, Wordsworth is saying something very much like Eliot was saying in those lines you just quoted. We wander through life. We forget. We are lost. In a sense, we have to wander to find that we are home, again. Ram Dass says it this way: “We’re all just walking each other home.” Ultimately, we recognize that we’ve been on sacred ground the whole time.
DAVID: What do you hope readers will find when they’ve read your book?
TOM: I hope they will come away from this book with a spiritual understanding of religious truth that is a deeper understanding than the conventional interpretations that are all around us. I want them to realize there is a real baby in this bathwater of spirituality and it shouldn’t all be tossed out the window. I want them to be able to name and claim something new as the foundation for a more life-giving faith.
(By David Crumm Read the Spirit 2013-08-05)
In his third book, Catholic retreat leader and spiritual director Stella (A Faith Worth Believing) urges readers not to let religion of any denominational flavor become a stumbling block to a profound encounter with God. As Phyllis Tickle argues in her influential Great Emergence, Stella also believes the Western world is transitioning "between an epoch of religion that is on the decline and an epoch of spirituality that is on the rise." Positing that our culture is out of touch with its soul, Stella generously invites spiritual seekers and the "nones"―those who say they have no religious affiliation―to experience God as the "ground of being," not a "super being" made in humans' image. He tackles head-on thorny topics too often avoided in fuzzier writing on spirituality―prayer in a non-theistic world, Jesus' distinctiveness, and God's existence in the midst of evil. Readers who appreciate the forward-thinking work of Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, and psychologist James Finley will find their perspectives used liberally. While not a book for Christian traditionalists, Stella offers a cup of cool water to the spiritually dehydrated. (May)
(Publisher's Weekly 2013-04-22)
Former Catholic priest Stella wants spiritual seekers to realize that God is in each of them, and if that sounds like the Quaker concept of the inner light, so be it. That it also suggests divine immanence, shorn of its orthodox confinement to the Incarnation but also free from pantheism, is implicit throughout this fluent, compelling guide. What religion in the title means also goes unstated, but the text inferentially confirms that the institutional church and its dogmas constitute most of what Stella advises seekers to go beyond to find God. Find but not become, for God is not a person. Indeed, as a person, God is not dead but never lived. In chapters provocatively titled to open up that conception of God―"From Belief to Faith," “Jesus: The Way, or in the Way?,” “Morality as Right Relationship,” “What Problem of Evil?,” “Church with a Mission, Mission with a Church”―Stella exposes how, in our time, anthropomorphizing God prevents the fuller life that Christianity, in particular, promises believers. Exceptionally cogent spiritual guidance.
(Ray Olson American Library Association Booklist 2013-05-15)
"A remarkably clear distillation of wisdom about what it means to be Christian in the twenty-first century."
―Marcus Borg, best-selling author, Speaking Christian and Evolution of the Word
"Essential reading for all spiritual seekers―and for all of us who live with big questions! Issues a compelling invitation for us to examine and enlarge our understanding of God and how we are of God. Highly recommended."
―Nancy L. Bieber, teacher; spiritual director; author, Decision Making & Spiritual Discernment: The Sacred Art of Finding Your Way
"Profound and personal ... challenges our familiar yet often unsatisfying approaches to prayer and belief, and moves beyond to the very heart of the divine experience. You need not agree with everything within to be able to answer this call to awaken and embrace the passionate spiritual life."
―The Rev. C. K. Robertson, PhD, Canon to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church; author, A Dangerous Dozen: 12 Christians Who Threatened the Status Quo but Taught Us to Live Like Jesus
“Stella shares the fruit of a lifetime's spiritual evolution and experience as he freshly interprets nine central dimensions of Christian faith. Many readers will find him a wise spiritual friend.... Highly recommended for seekers of a mature faith and spiritual community.”
―Rev. Tilden Edwards, PhD, founder and senior fellow, The Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation
“[Offers] the best insights of the most thoughtful theologians, poets and mystics.... Catholic Christians, take heart. Here's a book to vitalize faith. Protestants, secularists and persons put off by religion-as-usual, welcome.”
―The Rev. Dr. James W. White, PhD, minister emeritus, First Congregational UCC, Colorado Springs, Colorado
“Saves a new searcher many years of wandering, and reminds a fellow-traveler of the crucial insights from major spiritual stars, adding one―Stella himself.”
―Carolyn Jane Bohler, author, God the What? What Our Metaphors for God Reveal about Our Beliefs in God
From the Inside Flap
"I'm spiritual but not religious" is a phrase no longer voiced by only the young and those who have left the church. It is now a phrase used to describe the spiritual lives of the middle-aged and beyond, as well as those who continue to seek sustenance for their souls within church settings. Whether young or old, church-connected or not, there is a spiritual restlessness among those who seek an authentic faith life but do not find conventional religious teachings meaningful.
This accessible guide to a meaningful spiritual life is a salve for the spiritually anxious and hungry. It reinterprets traditional religious teachings central to the Christian faith God, Jesus, faith, prayer, morality and more in a way that connects with those who have outgrown the beliefs and devotional practices that once made sense to them. It helps readers find new ways to understand and relate to traditional, narrowly defined Christian "truths" that honor their full spiritual power and scope.
Ideal for personal spiritual nourishment, small group practice or as a spiritual direction resource, this guide invites readers to open their minds and hearts to the full impact of Christian teachings and to consider alternative ways to understand them.
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Meet the Growing Millions Walking Away from Organized Religion
By David Crumm
Tom Stella is a pastor to the non-religious, especially to the growing millions of men and women who respond to pollsters' questions about religious affiliation with: "None." While still a minority of the American population, this widely divergent group is often stereotyped as shallow, selfish or heretical. Stella argues persuasively that this is hardly the case. In fact, he argues, people choosing their own spiritual pathway are opting for a tougher journey than adherence to traditional denominations.
Don't mistake Tom Stella's book for a Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens screed against religion. Sure, Tom argues that many traditional doctrines simply don't make sense to millions of men and women today. But there are deeper truths, he writes, that these people are finding and a compassionate goodness in this movement if properly understood.
Tom Stella doesn't call them "Nones," a phrase popular in news media these days. He prefers the phrase "unorthodox believers," which appears in his subtitle. Tom says he is writing about "people who are not being fed by the traditional church. Yet, some of the healthiest religious people I know are unorthodox believers. They wouldn't call themselves `religious' necessarily. Many of the unorthodox believers I have encountered do believe that there is a communion with the divinity, although they are likely to see this divinity as a communion with the spirit of humanity. The term `unorthodox believer' covers a lot of ground; it's a big umbrella. I'm saying in this book that it's important for traditional religious groups not to just write off these folks as heretics or atheists. These folks are spiritually hungry. They're grappling with, and many of them longing for, ways to relate to the larger community."
You'll want to read this book if you're already an avid reader of books by John Shelby Spong, such as A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying & How a New Faith is Being Born and Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World. Stella acknowledges that the two of them take a very similar approach to these issues. You'll want to read this book if you are a part of this growing minority of the population, dissatisfied with existing congregations. You'll want to read the book if you're part of traditional religious groups wanting to understand the people who are walking away from churches.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
An "Independent Study" for anyone on a personal spiritual Journey
By Ed 2015
Reading this book was like being in my own spiritual direction with the author Tom Stella. Tom's personal ways of writing about important spiritual issues made me feel as if we were together in a retreat house, next to a fireplace, exploring questions of God, faith, and spirituality. At the same time, the book seems to offer valuable "Cliff's Notes" for major philosophical and theological theories and religious traditions. Tom is well versed in many different theologies and religions. His style of weaving quotes and references of many great spiritual thinkers throughout the chapters deepens the readers reflections on their own beliefs about God, faith, life and love. The book is a challenging read in that Tom challenges some long standing (but out dated) views about God and Faith. However, he always offers ingredients for a personalized new approach and vision - including, "Questions for your own journey" at the end of each chapter. This helps the reader create for themselves a more personalized God and faith. This book would also be great for prayer and spiritual study groups.
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
An Inaccurate Title
By Book-Movie-Music Lover
I tend to have problems with books that have titles not directly related to the contents of the books. Unfortunately, this is one of them.
If the author had titled his book, "How Catholics Can Loosen Up and Help the Institutional Catholic Church Loosen Up, Too," it would have been aptly titled, and I would have given it five stars for succeeding in its mission. (However, if the author had given his book that title, I never would have read it in the first place.)
The title the author gave the book was: "Finding God Beyond Religion." However, there was virtually nothing in the book that focused on this topic. There are millions of people who prefer to connect and communicate directly with God without the aid of any religion at all. Others, unable to experience God through Western religions, find success in doing so through Eastern religions. This book covers none of this.
So, if you're a Catholic who wants his/her church to "loosen up," this might be an interesting book. In fact, the Bible is quoted on almost every page, and the Catholic Church is mentioned on almost every page. However, if you're looking for information on how to have a relationship with God without any religion at all, you won't find much useful information on these pages.
However, the author does strike me as a very nice and kind person, who means well, which is why the book merits more than two stars. In other words, I don't think he intended to purposely deceive his readers. I think he is just really gung-ho on the Catholic Church and wants to see it evolve.
I also noticed (as of this writing)that four other reviewers had given this book the coveted five-star rating. However, when I checked their "See All My Reviews" links, all of these were people who have bestowed the coveted five-star ratings on everything they have ever reviewed on this site, which makes me wonder just how objective their assessments are.
See all 19 customer reviews...
Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding PDF
Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding EPub
Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding Doc
Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding iBooks
Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding rtf
Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding Mobipocket
Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding Kindle
> Fee Download Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding Doc
> Fee Download Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding Doc
> Fee Download Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding Doc
> Fee Download Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding Doc
