Review: Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles' Creed, by Brother David Steindl-Rast

There is something a bit jarring about seeing the words “Apostles’ Creed” and “Foreword by His Holiness the Dalai Lama” printed on the cover of a book, but the name of the author reassures us that somehow it will end up making a great deal of sense.

That’s because the author is Brother David Steindl-Rast, an Austrian-born Benedictine monk, who is one of the great teachers in our Church. He has been a leading figure in the Church’s dialog with Buddhism, a tradition for which he has developed considerable sympathies. He describes in the introduction how he came to write this book at the urging of the Dalai Lama, and why he chose the Apostles’ Creed, of all things:

In interreligious dialogue we tend to quote from our respective traditions those passages that the others are most likely to find acceptable. But increasingly this had begun to seem a bit superficial to me. I had come to feel that for genuine agreement we would have to go deeper; we would have to test whether even the least likely texts—say, a creed—could help deepen interreligious understanding. Wars have been fought even among co-religionists over these succinct summaries of essential beliefs. A creed would thus make the perfect touchstone for the possibility of interreligious agreement on that deep level where it matters. That's why I chose the Apostles' Creed—the oldest of the Christian creeds—and thus this book came about.

The Creed basically provides Brother David with his Table of Contents: there are twenty four chapters, each devoted to one line (or in a couple of cases, part of a line) of the Creed.

Each chapter is divided into four sections. Referring to the line in the Creed that serves as the title of the chapter, he asks, “What does this really mean?” and he offers an interpretation of the line. Then he asks, “How do we know this is so?” and explains his answer to the first question. He then asks, “Why make such a point of this?” which he answers by explaining why this matters to us today. Finally, he ends each chapter with his personal reflections.

There wasn’t a single chapter in this book that I didn’t find deeply thought provoking. Brother David takes the familiar words of the Creed—words that for many people have become stale and lifeless, if the droning recitation one hears in Church is any indication—and reveals unfamiliar depths of meaning, reading the Creed as a faith proclamation in poetry, rather than a prosaic checklist of beliefs.

His non-literal interpretation of the Creed will probably not endear him to the mythic membership crowd. Anyone looking for a reflection on a literal virgin birth or ascension into heaven will be disappointed. But even the events Brother David acknowledges as historical—suffering under Pontius Pilate, crucifixion, death and burial, etc.—are here interpreted as having a deep and enduring significance, well beyond their historical facticity.

Readers of Brother David’s previous works will not be surprised to find frequent quotations of poetry. He quotes from Gerard Manley Hopkins, Theodore Roethke, Jessica Powers, Mary Oliver, Kabir, and Patricia Campbell Carlson, among others. I often get a little impatient when writers quote poetry, but in Brother David’s work poetry is never used as mere ornamentation or for showing off.

After reading the introduction (and the foreword by the Dalai Lama) I expected there would be more frequent references to Buddhism than there actually were. But this is quite thoroughly a Christian book, in a very catholic, which is to say “all-embracing,” way. Indeed, his rather generous interpretations of the Creed’s “Holy Catholic Church” and “Communion of Saints” will leave exclusivists shaking their heads in indignation. (This is not a criticism, just an observation.)

So how, then, does Brother David further the cause of interreligious understanding? He does not do this by suggesting that the Christian beliefs expressed in the Apostles’ Creed are the same as those expressed by Buddhists or Hindus. Rather, he shows that the essential Christian message is a universal message of faith and love, of belonging and sharing, that transcends the boundary lines we draw around ourselves in the name of religion.

The great scholar of religion Huston Smith wrote of this book:

I have always felt that in endorsing a book I was honoring the book and its author. Brother David’s Deeper Than Words, however, brought a new and startling sensation: I found myself sensing that the book was honoring me by allowing me to endorse it. Never before have I felt this way about a book.

I feel much the same way. This is truly a very special book.

Review: A New Kind of Christianity by Brian McLaren

I picked up this book with some ambivalence. When I've read Brian McLaren's work in the past, I could tell that he was a progressive thinker with a deep understanding of why and where the Christian religion needs to change, but I could never shake the suspicion that he was holding something back. This was understandable--he writes, I think, for a largely Evangelical audience, so it is not surprising that he would sugarcoat his more progressive ideas to make them palatable to his not-particularly-progressive audience. But I'm not a part of that audience, and I didn't think I had much to learn from him.

The reviews for this book persuaded me to give it a shot, and I'm glad I did, because it's quite good. McLaren seems no longer to be restraining himself and has put forth an unabashedly progressive vision for a new kind of Christianity. For the progressive Christian reader he covers a lot of familiar ground, but he does so with arguments and examples that are lucid and, for me anyway, quite novel.

The larger part of the book deals with the "Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith." (A less optimistic person would describe them as "Ten Contentious Issues That Are Dividing the Church.")

The first concerns the "overarching story line of the Bible," which McLaren argues is quite different from the Creation/Fall/Redemption narrative most Christians have been taught, explicitly or not. He describes the latter as a "six-line narrative," beginning with perfection in the Garden of Eden, then "the Fall" into original sin, and then a period of condemnation. Following this is the coming of Christ, where the path splits in two directions: salvation and heaven for some, damnation and hell (understood as "eternal conscious torment") for others.

McLaren notes that this story can lead to an understanding of the meaning of our earthly existence as simply a process of "soul-sorting," where the purpose of our lives is to "deliver souls into their appropriate eternal bin." He also notes that a lot of people have been questioning this storyline, and suggesting ways in which it needs to be tweaked, but too few have actually questioned if this story "is morally believable" or "whether it can be found in the Bible itself." (He argues that it's not and that it can't.)

This is mostly good stuff, and I agree that understanding our existence this way is a gross distortion of the message of Jesus. Unfortunately, McLaren stumbles a bit when he blames it on the "Greco-Romanization" of the Church, which he understands as the appropriation by the Church of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. This is the weakest part of the book, as McLaren misrepresents both of those philosophers and the ways they influenced Christian theology. He does this as part of the creation of a "Greco-Roman" bogeyman, complete with its own god, "Theos," against which he can juxtapose the more authentic and more Jewish narrative he wants to promote. (He would do well to follow the advice of Albert Einstein: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.") In fairness to McLaren, he does acknowledge later on that it is too simple to "blame all our problems on the the Greco-Roman captivity of the biblical narrative." But that doesn't solve the problem of what he wrote earlier, which will turn off most people who actually know something about Greek philosophy.

McLaren finds another source of the Church's ills is the tendency to read the Bible as if it was a legal constitution that is univocal and internally consistent, instead of seeing it as a community library that contains a number of often dissonant voices and preserves the "vigorous internal debate around key questions that were precious to the theological culture in which it was produced." McLaren describes a number of ways the constitutional approach to the Bible has been used to justify evils like slavery and to condemn advances in science. Many Christians like to imagine that such abuses belong exclusively to the past, but McLaren disagrees, pointing to the widespread hostility toward homosexuals by those who read the Bible constitutionally as an example.

For many progressive Christians, a lot of what McLaren writes will sound familiar: Jesus' message about the "kingdom of God," commonly (and erroneously) understood as pertaining exclusively or at least primarily to the afterlife, is much more about transformation in this life; he points out that Jesus's message was not about converting from one religion to another, and this has implications for how Christians should relate to people of other faiths. Those familiar with the thought of Ken Wilber will see his influence in the last part of the book.

None of this is earth-shattering, but McLaren articulates it very clearly and has a knack for teasing out the perverse implications of some common Christian beliefs, often in ways I had never thought of. At the same time, he recognises that this new kind of Christianity isn't for everyone, and I disagree with his critics who claim that he is disrespectful or condescending towards those who disagree with him. On the contrary, he is unfailingly nice, which is probably why so many of his critics have labeled him a "wolf in sheep's clothing."

But McLaren is not a wolf, and he's not pretending to be a sheep. He's trying to show people that they don't need to be sheep, either. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in progressive Christianity, and I think this would be a great book to give to someone who is beginning to grow out of their conventional faith.

Terry Eagleton on postmodernism

This quotation from Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, by Terry Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic, was printed in the current issue of EnlightenNext magazine:

“Postmodernism is allergic to the idea of certainty, and makes a great deal of theoretical fuss over this rather modest, everyday notion. As such, it is in some ways the flip side of fundamentalism... Some postmodern thought suspects that all certainty is authoritarian. It is nervous of people who sound passionately committed to what they say. In this, it represents among other things an excessive reaction to fascism and Stalinism. The totalitarian politics of the twentieth century did not only launch an assault on truth in their own time; they also helped to undermine the idea of truth for future generations. The line between holding certain noxious kinds of belief, and holding strong beliefs at all, then becomes dangerously unclear. Conviction itself is condemned as dogmatic.”¹

I haven’t read anything by Eagleton in years, and was somewhat surprised to find that he, who is himself an atheist, apparently takes Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins to task in this book for, among other things, misrepresenting religion in their recent atheist rants.

I find Hitchens, and especially Dawkins, to be rather tiresome, but Eagleton is such a witty writer that I think I’m going to have to check it out.

Notes

[1] Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Quoted in EnlightenNext. 45 (September-November 2009): 22.

The Red Book

From the New York Times, September 16, 2009:

This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say “Liber Novus,” which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome.

And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again.

Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it.

Of those who did see it, at least one person, an educated Englishwoman who was allowed to read some of the book in the 1920s, thought it held infinite wisdom — “There are people in my country who would read it from cover to cover without stopping to breathe scarcely,” she wrote — while another, a well-known literary type who glimpsed it shortly after, deemed it both fascinating and worrisome, concluding that it was the work of a psychotic.

I remember when I was in high school seeing a reference to Carl Jung’s The Red Book in, I believe, a footnote of another book. It mentioned that the book had never been published, which struck me as odd. Why would a book by such an important author not be published so many decades after his death?

I didn’t think much of it, and even forgot that The Red Book existed, until I came across this fascinating story (“The Holy Grail of the Unconscious” by Sara Corbett) in the New York Times.

Apparently Jung laboured over it on and off for sixteen years, and it held enormous personal significance for him. He was ambivalent about publishing it, however, as he feared it might invite ridicule from his peers. He left no instructions for his family about what to do with it, and two generations of very protective Jungs argued with each other over whether or not it should be published or not.

This October, finally, it is being published. It was written in German and features beautiful paintings by Jung himself (some of which have been shown here). An English translation of the text will be included in the back of the book.

The cover price is $195 US, but it’s selling for $105 US on Amazon. I’m very, very tempted.

Review: Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution, by Steve McIntosh

When I discovered the work of integral philosopher Ken Wilber about three years ago, I was very excited. Cultural evolution had long been a fascination of mine, and was central to my understanding of the gospel (it sort of relates to what I wrote here), so I was thrilled to find a contemporary thinker who wrote so compellingly about it.

At the same time I had serious reservations. His method was (and is) something less than rigorous. He has a penchant for hyperbole that is unbecoming of a philosopher. And his epistemology is idealistic, which I find problematic.

I was also unenthused with the sycophantic dogmatism displayed by many of his readers on the Integral Institute Multiplex discussion forums.

Some of my posts on those forums were copied and pasted on another blog, and someone, commenting on them, noted that I "ask legitimate questions but border on heresy and [risk] being kicked out" of the Integral Institute forums. (That last part might have been an exaggeration, but clearly I'm not the only one to notice the unwelcome emergence of an integral orthodoxy.)

I was pleased to discover Steve McIntosh's 2007 book Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. While acknowledging his debt to Wilber, McIntosh makes some quite valid criticisms of Wilber, which are not far different from my own.

McIntosh spends nearly 150 pages introducing integral philosophy. His discussion of the stages of consciousness and culture includes a nice description of the work of Clare Graves, and what has now become known as "spiral dynamics." Disappointingly, McIntosh likens the parallel between cultural and individual consciousness development to the long-discredited notion that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in biology:

Just as in biological evolution, where we see a human fetus grow through the stages of the entire tree of life as it develops, we can now likewise see within the development of each human mind, a rough approximation of the evolution of human cultural history. (32)

I also rolled my eyes a bit when I reached the chapter on integral politics, which makes the case for some form of global governance. McIntosh is aware that this idea is usually dismissed as "an idealistic fantasy best left for another century," while others consider it "the world's worst nightmare, a scenario in which the corporate elite gain complete control, and everything that is currently wrong with the U.S. government becomes writ-large on the world" (105).

While I think McIntosh makes some compelling arguments, I think he underestimates the resistance such an idea would face in the country whose participation would be most critical, namely the US. Just consider the hysterical reaction among American conservatives to such benign instruments as the United Nations "Convention on the Rights of the Child." These are people with an already-established animus against anything that smacks of "world government," and, as a Monty Python sketch once said about similar creatures, "Once they get an idea in their heads, there's no shiftin' it."

I can't do justice to McIntosh's arguments for this idea (and against the inevitable objections), but suffice it to say, I don't think it is going to be a realistic possibility at any time in the near future. But then again, who knows? In periods of upheaval like we are currently experiencing, previously unthinkable things become thinkable.

In the second part of his book, McIntosh surveys some of the important thinkers whose works have influenced integral thought, including Hegel, Bergson, Whitehead, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser, James Mark Baldwin, Clare W. Graves, Jurgen Habermas, and, of course, Ken Wilber.

Although McIntosh is very appreciative of Wilber's contribution, he acknowledges also his weaknesses, such as "the fact that [Wilber] sometimes plays fast and loose with a lot of serious scholarship, using it in ways the authors he cites would be unlikely to agree with" (155). He notes, too, that Wilber is both a philosopher and a spiritual teacher. While there is nothing wrong with this, Wilber "does advance his personal belief system as though it were an empirical matter of fact," and "it is often difficult to separate his philosophy from his religion" (155). McIntosh says that, "for those of us who are not Hindus or Buddhists, Wilber's spiritual teaching does not always speak to our experiences of spirit" (155).

I don't think I'm as bothered by this as McIntosh is, and I'm a little bit more sympathetic than he is with Wilber's belief that a "broad empiricism" can attain objective truth from mystical experience, something I've touched on before in my consideration of Zen in the light of Bernard Lonergan's cognitional theory.¹

There are some problems. McIntosh often refers to "the will," in the problematic sense of a psychological faculty. He also confuses "intentionality" with "volition." This is partly understandable, as in popular parlance they mean basically the same thing. In philosophy, however, "intentionality" means something quite different. In philosophy, when it is said that mental states (or acts of sensation, for that matter) are "intentional," it means that they are always about something. So "thinking" is intentional because you cannot think without thinking about something. It has nothing to do with volition. He misunderstands Franz Brentano to have been speaking of intentionality in the popular sense (as volition), which was not how Brentano used the term. He misunderstands a quotation by Allan Combs in the same way (which is odd, because the quotation itself contains an explanation of the correct meaning of the term).

Those quibbles aside, I would still recommend this book to someone looking for a clear and very readable introduction to integral philosophy. The original contributions (described in a section under the helpful heading "What I Add to Integral Philosophy") are somewhat underwhelming, being mostly limited to greater emphasis on this, an enhanced understanding of that, disagreements with Ken Wilber on this, that, and the other -- but McIntosh does a good job of explaining integral philosophy, and it's good to have published criticisms of Wilber from within the community of self-identified integral thinkers. He also writes very perceptively about politics, and I suspect this is one area where McIntosh will make a very substantial and original contribution.

Notes

[1] I should add, though, that while Wilber's notion of "broad empiricism" and Lonergan's generalized empirical method have some things in common (such as the recognition that experience of data of consciousness, and not merely data of sense, can, after a process of understanding, result in objective knowledge), Wilber has not fully recognised the importance of reasonable judgment and what Lonergan calls "grasp of the virtually unconditioned" in the attainment of knowledge.

Review: With or Without God, by Gretta Vosper

As I've mentioned before, I wasn't overly enthusiastic about reading this book when I first became aware of it in March. Years ago I read a couple of books by John Shelby Spong, and while I enjoyed them, I ultimately found his vision of what Christianity might become to be a little thin. Spong was good at deconstructing Christianity, but much less capable of reconstructing it. When I saw that he wrote the foreward of Gretta Vosper's book, and found his name on the dedication page, I assumed Vosper might be offering up much of the same.

I wasn't wrong. And yet, I still enjoyed the book, even as I found it really underwhelming. Vosper writes with good humour, and avoids the counterproductive polemical tone found in Spong's work. Like Spong, she's good at identifying where changes need to be made.

Vosper echoes some of the points made by Jack Good in his book The Dishonest Church, which she explicitly cites. She notes the disparity between what members of the clergy are taught in seminary and what they actually preach from the pulpit. She rejects the approach taken by Historical Jesus scholar Marcus Borg, who seems content to keep the established language and forms of worship, while reinterpreting them in a non-literal way. I agree with some of her criticisms of Borg, but I hardly consider him to be part of the problem.

One major disagreement I have with Vosper is in the understanding of spiritual development. She draws on the work of James Fowler, and to some extent seems to have a good grasp of his theory. But I wonder. She writes at one point, "Fowler's ultimate stage in faith development ("Universalizing Faith") is where I believe the church should be as an institution" (275). I'm not sure what to make of that. The number of people who reach that stage is miniscule -- about 0.3% of the population, according to Fowler's Stages of Faith (319). This assertion is so preposterous, it makes me wonder if Vosper has actually read Fowler's work.

It should definitely be a priority of the church to encourage every member to develop as far as they will go. Needless to say, this doesn't happen: Church teaching is often aimed at stopping people at Stage 3 ("Synthetic Conventional"), before people start questioning authority and the tacitly held beliefs that are considered "orthodox."

Having said that, even if people were encouraged to develop as far as they could go, the fact is, people have to go through the lower stages. You can't just teach your kid to be a Stage 6 Christian. Everyone has to go through every stage, and they have to be taught at the stage they presently inhabit. You can't teach a Stage 6 level of faith to someone at Stage 2 ("Mythic Literal") any more than you could teach quantum physics to a six year-old.

Vosper's ideas about Jesus are interesting, but not without problems. Like progressive Christians generally, Vosper argues that a lot of the traditional beliefs about Jesus have got to go. She goes a bit further, though. Pointing to the scholarly efforts to determine what Jesus really said, Vosper writes, "In trying to capture exactly what he said, we have found, quite by accident, that what he said has little power" (41). I disagree with that, but judging from Vosper's interpretation of Jesus's message, I can see how she would arrive at that conclusion. Which is to say, I don't agree with her interpretation. She dismisses Jesus's words in Luke 12:22-29 by saying, "We cannot afford to be reckless about the future" (154), as if that's what he was counselling. If I felt that Jesus's words had "little power," I'm not sure I'd bother with Christianity, to be honest, but maybe that's just me.

Vosper acknowledges that, "Progressive thinking is not everyone's cup of tea, but it is the only tool that will possibly pull us through to the next stage of the church's development" (150). I agree, but I don't think Vosper's brand of progressive thinking is going to do the trick. I'm glad I read her book, as it's given me an opportunity to think about, and clarify, my own perspective. I would recommend it to anyone interested in progressive Christianity. But I can't endorse her main suggestions, because I think a much more robust and profound spirituality is possible, and necessary.

Gretta Vosper's Without or Without God: Orange or Green?

I recently started reading With or Without God, a new book by Gretta Vosper. Normally I don't blog about books while I'm reading them, but this one is particularly relevant to progressive Christianity, which is what this blog was meant to be about (and sometimes actually is). I knew I was going to have to blog about it when I found myself doing something I never do to my books -- I pulled out a pencil and started writing comments in the margins. (I have this weird, almost religious reverence towards books, which is why most of the books on my shelves look like they've never been read, much less written-in.)

Vosper is the pastor of the West Hill United Church, here in Toronto. She is also the founder and chair of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity. She is, apparently, somewhat controversial even within her own denomination, the already-quite-progressive United Church of Canada.

I was hesitant to pick this one up, for two reasons. First, I read an article in Maclean's a few weeks ago (I think I blogged about it, actually), and I wasn't overly impressed with what Vosper had to say. Second, the book is dedicated to, and features a foreward written by, John Shelby Spong. I don't have anything against Spong as a person -- I met him a few years ago, and he's a real gentleman, and a good speaker -- but I find his vision for the Christian religion to be a little thin. I suspected Vosper might be offering more of the same (and, though I'm not quite finished the book, that is still my impression).

Today I read an interesting article by Douglas Todd of the Vancouver Sun, that was published on Saturday. It compares Vosper's book with Emerging Church: A Model for Change and a Map for Renewal, a new book by Bruce Sanguin, who, like Vosper, is a pastor in the United Church of Canada.

I haven't read anything by Sanguin before, but in his latest book he apparently makes reference to Spiral Dynamics, and specifically the work of Don Beck. My knowledge of Spiral Dynamics is limited to what I've read about it in works by Ken Wilber. I actually thought about it as I was reading Vosper's book, because it seems to me that she is writing from a strictly "green" perspective. (By Douglas Todd's reckoning, it's more likely the "orange" level, which is the stage before green.)

Todd says he prefers Sanguin's "option of exploring different ways of understanding God, not defaulting to only ethics," as Vosper apparently proposes. He writes, "Given all the expansive, multidisciplinary thinking going in progressive Christian circles these days, it's hard to understand why Vosper ignores so much of it." I've been wondering much the same thing.

I should have some time to finish her book in the next couple of days, so hopefully I'll be able to write something about it soon.

Complete Works Cited Page

Abbreviations

Ascent - The Ascent of Mount Carmel (St. John of the Cross)
AYBD - Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary
CCC - Catechism of the Catholic Church
BDAG - A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament..., 3rd ed.
Dark Night - The Dark Night (St. John of the Cross)
HCBC - HarperCollins Bible Commentary
JB - Jerusalem Bible
NAB - New American Bible
NJB - New Jerusalem Bible
NJBC - New Jerome Biblical Commentary
NRSV - New Revised Standard Version
RSV - Revised Standard Version
SCG - Summa Contra Gentiles (St. Thomas Aquinas)
ST - Summa Theologiae (St. Thomas Aquinas)
WBC - Word Biblical Commentary

Quotations from the Bible are (unless otherwise specified) from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Quotations from Summa Theologiae (cited as ST) by St. Thomas Aquinas are from the Second Revised Edition, translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920.

Quotations from St. John of the Cross are from The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross. Revised Edition. Translated by Kieran Kavanaugh OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD. Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1991.

Quotations from the Catechism of the Catholic Church are from the English translation, © 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc.


Other Works Cited:

Bauer, Walter, F.W. Danker, W.F. Arndt and F.W. Gingrich. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Aslan, Reza. No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam. 2005. London: Arrow Books, 2006.

Aune, David E. "Revelation." HarperCollins Bible Commentary. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2000: 1187-1202.

Aune, David E. "The Revelation to John (Apocalypse)." HarperCollins Study Bible. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993: 2307-2337.

Borg, Marcus J. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

Borg, Marcus J. Reading the Bible Again for the First Time. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

Brown, Raymond E., SS, et al, eds. The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. 1989. London: Chapman, 2000. [Quotations from the New Jerome Biblical Commentary (cited as NJBC) are referenced by chapter and section rather than by page number.]

Carroll, Lewis. The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass. 1865-1871. Martin Gardner, ed. London: Penguin Books, 1970.

Cross, F. L. and Elizabeth A. Livingstone. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. 3rd ed. rev. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

de Mello, Anthony. Awareness: The Perils and Opportunities of Reality. New York: Image Books, 1990.

de Mello, Anthony. One Minute Wisdom. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. 1974. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.

Dillard, Annie. The Writing Life. New York: HarperPerennial, 1990.

Dunn, James D.G. Did the First Christians Worship Jesus? The New Testament Evidence. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010.

Dunn, James D.G. The Epistle to the Galatians. Black's New Testament Commentary. 1993. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2006.

Dunn, James D.G. Romans. Word Biblical Commentary 38A, 38B. Dallas: Word, 1988.

Dunn, James D.G. The Theology of Paul the Apostle. 1998. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2006.

Ford, John C., and Germain Grisez. "Contraception and the Infallibility of the Ordinary Magisterium," Theological Studies 39 (1978): 258-312.

Fowler, James W. Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000.

Fowler, James W. Faithful Change. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.

Fowler, James W. Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. 1981. New York: HarperOne, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. 1927. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.

Heim, S. Mark. Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995.

Hick, John. Disputed Questions in Theology and the Philosophy of Religion. London: Macmillan, 1993.

Hick, John. An Interpretation of Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

Hick, John. “The Latest Vatican Statement on Christianity and Other Religions.” December, 1998. (online)

Hick, John. The Metaphor of God Incarnate: Christology in a Pluralistic Age. 2nd Edition. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. 1902. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985.

Kanaris, Jim, and Mark J. Doorley, eds. In Deference to the Other: Lonergan and Contemporary Continental Thought. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2004.

Knitter, Paul F. Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009.

Kyabgon, Traleg. Mind at Ease: Self-Liberation through Mahamudra Meditation. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2003.

Lewis, Bernard. The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror. 2003. London: Phoenix, 2004.

Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. 1940. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

Lonergan, Bernard. "Cognitional Structure." Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, S.J. 1967. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 4. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988: 205-221.

Lonergan, Bernard. "Dialectic of Authority." A Third Collection: Papers By Bernard J.F. Lonergan, S.J. Fredrick E. Crowe, ed. New York: Paulist Press, 1985: 5-12.

Lonergan, Bernard. Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. 1957. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Vol. 3. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, eds. 1992. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

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