Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church

by Tom Stella, Marianne Wells Borg (Foreword by)

Overview

Take Your Understanding of Church Teachings from Limiting to Life-Giving—and Free Your Faith to Flourish

"No longer sustained by easy answers, we may find ourselves standing before a three-pronged fork in the road: we can wander in the direction of conventional beliefs and practices, we can reject God and turn away from religion altogether, or we can embrace our uncertainty as an invitation to a more vital understanding of both God and religion."
—from the Introduction

Do you describe yourself as "spiritual but not religious"? Whether young or old, church connected or not, are you spiritually restless for an authentic faith life but do not find conventional religious teachings pertinent to you?

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594734854
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Tom Stella, a former Catholic priest, is author of A Faith Worth Believing and The God Instinct. He is a hospice chaplain, visiting professor of religion at Colorado College, a retreat facilitator and spiritual director and cofounder of Soul Link, a non-profit organization whose mission is to bring spiritual seekers together.

Tom Stella is available to speak on the following topics:

• CPR for the Soul
• Living in the "I" of the Hurricane
• Thomas Merton: Guide for a Seeker's Soul
• A Community of Mystics: A New Old Way of Being Church
• Becoming Our True Self Again
• Meaning In the Madness
• Religion: Help or Hindrance on the Spiritual Path?
• A Spirituality for Men

The Rev. Canon Marianne Wells Borg is former canon pastor at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon, and founding director of The Center for Spiritual Development, an outreach ministry engaging in Christian life in the twenty-first century.

Read an Excerpt

Finding God Beyond Religion

A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church

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By TOM STELLA

SKYLIGHT PATHS PUBLISHING

Copyright © 2013 Tom Stella
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59473-485-4

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CHAPTER 1

God Beyond Religion

Perhaps the greatest disaster of human history is one that happened to or within religion: that is the conceptual division between the holy and the world, the excerpting of the Creator from creation.

—Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony

The author of this epigraph is not only a writer but a farmer as well. Berry's books speak eloquently of the rural South, life on the land, and the spirituality of creation. His earthy understanding of the holiness of the simple life and of nature's ways is based on the belief that God is not apart from creation but one with it. For Berry, and for many who no longer fi nd meaning in the notion of God as a Supreme Being (theism), the Divine is now considered the ground, the spiritual humus, the nonmaterial and sacred stuff of which everything consists and in which everything exists and grows.

The Judging God

I first learned about God within the confines of traditional religion. It was there, in church and catechism classes, that I was given the message that "He" was someone somewhere else who would, from time to time and in response to fervent prayer, intervene on behalf of the righteous. The Holy and the world, the Creator and creation were not one but two.

This God is made in the image of humanity, with physical attributes usually thought to be male (complete with beard and booming voice); emotional attributes consisting of the extremes of love and anger, jealousy and mercy, and so on; and mental attributes usually considered to be a plan that must be discerned—God's will, or the "mind of God."

The God I encountered within religion was one who judged my every action and who made a judgment about the reward or punishment I would receive beyond this life. The notion of God as judge is present in the Bible, especially in the Hebrew Scriptures, where in Psalm 7:12 it states that God is a just judge who rebukes in anger every day. Mythologist Joseph Campbell claims that "people think of their God as having sentiments as we do, liking these people better than those, and having certain rules for their lives." I grew up believing that God only loved those who always kept the rules of religion, not those who, like me, did so inconsistently.

I have experienced in myself and have witnessed in others the limiting, debilitating, and sometimes paralyzing effect of the belief in God thus understood. I know many people who no longer believe that God is distant and punitive but who continue to fear God. One of those people, Charles, told me about a dream he had in which his father said that if he continued to misbehave, he would surely fall into sin. Charles then spoke about how critical and nonaffirming his father had been toward him and his siblings when they were young, and that he now realized that he had projected this negativity onto God, whom he felt he could never please.

The notion of God as a critical parent packs a powerful emotional charge, the freedom from which is often a gradual, hard-won, and lifelong process. It has taken me years of study, countless meetings with spiritual directors, and many hours of prayer to begin embracing God as personal rather than as a person, as a part of life rather than apart from it, and as compassionate rather than punitive. Liberation from the oppressive effects of a negative theism is not easily attained. Achieving this freedom requires learning how not to cede power to guilt and how to embrace a faith that is based on the conviction that the true God may not be the God about whom many of us first learned.

Discovering a Different God

In contrast to this, the God of Rumi's field, Dillard's path, and Berry's farm is not found within religion, but beyond it; that is, beyond the doctrines and dogmas, the creeds and claims that speak of God as a being separate from creation. To discover God beyond religion is to uncover God in the midst of life. In our groping, we may stumble upon the Holy in nature as well as in church. We sometimes hear the Sacred sounding through popular songs as well as religious hymns. We may be guided by God's word in novels and poetry as well as in scripture. And our souls may be renewed by immersion in our hobbies as well as through participation in devotional practices.

Those who grope along the "night-blind mesas and flayed hills" that make up the spiritual path not only search for God beyond religion but do so, Dillard claims, "with the goal of knowing the absolute"; that is, in the hope of experiencing God in the frayed fabric of life itself. For those of us who wander this path, God is found not only in the heavens but in the midst of our lives: here, where we live and work; here, in us and in others, Divinity lurks omnipresent. This is not a New Age concept but one that is age-old, for scripture states: "In God we live and move and exist" (Acts 17:28).

The notion that God is present in the nitty-gritty of life is also found in Celtic spirituality, which is characterized by earthiness and speaks of "thin places" where the omnipresence of God is experienced in a very real, tangible way. The Irish poet, philosopher, and scholar John O'Donohue articulates the essence of Celtic spirituality when he writes:

The Celtic mind was not burdened by dualism. It did not separate what belongs together.... The dualism that separates the visible from the invisible, time from eternity, the human from the divine, was totally alien to them."

The artist Pablo Picasso is credited with having said, "It takes a long time to become young!" Picasso had discovered that only after a long life filled with at least as many downs as ups and failures as successes could one become not only wise but, like a child, truly innocent and free. Paradoxically, I was not young enough to know or experience the full meaning and liberating ramifications of the word omnipresent when I first heard it, but as I've grown "younger" through the years, I have come to realize its radical breadth and depth. God is not someone who has mastered the art of bilocation; rather, God is a word that refers to the sacred mystery that is the spiritual essence of all creation. In support of this notion, theologian Michael Himes claims, "The word 'God' functions like x in algebra. It is a stand-in for the ... absolute mystery which grounds and supports all that exists."

Perhaps it is the child in us that knows the simple yet mind-boggling truth of God's omnipresence. This is what Jesus seems to indicate when, in addressing his followers, he said: "I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children" (Matthew 11:25). To posit that God is the omnipresent Ground of our being, a notion put forth by theologian Paul Tillich and popularized by Bishop John A. T. Robinson in his classic work Honest to God, is not an advanced theory that only the learned and clever can comprehend, but an attempt to move beyond the limits of conceptualization by affirming with childlike wonder that the reality of God is not spatial but spiritual.

No theological words or concepts, no religious gestures or rituals, are sufficient to express this mystery. I was reminded of this by a nun for whom I serve as a spiritual director. A woman who has grown younger throughout her fifty-plus years in the convent, Sister Miriam stated that one day, while making the sign of the cross (touching her forehead, chest, and both shoulders while saying "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit"), she had this childlike thought: "It's too small." Even the concept of the Trinity, about which tomes have been written, had become too confining for her experience of the infinite and intimate nature of God. As feeble as our attempts may be, the need to give expression both in word and gesture to our experience of the Divine is a powerful and positive instinct; however, it is important to remember that when we try to name the unnameable, we often end up limiting the limitless.

When I was first exposed to the idea of God beyond religion, I found it not only eye-opening but, in a sense, heartbreaking as well. I had had a relationship with God that was far more than a matter of belief, because I spoke to God, I sought solace in God, and I felt that, along with being protected, I was both known and loved by God. Although I now experience God's presence in a way that is more mysterious and yet more personal than was the case in my youth, letting go of the belief that God is an actual person has precipitated a process of grieving that, years later, I continue to feel from time to time. I still miss the old guy!

But just as it is necessary to exhale in order to inhale, I have found that, without letting go of my early notions of God, there could be no room in me for a new and more expansive understanding of Divinity or for the liberating way of life that flows from it—one that is free from the fear of a punitive God and free for an experience of God in the nitty-gritty of everyday life and relationships.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Finding God Beyond Religion by TOM STELLA. Copyright © 2013 Tom Stella. Excerpted by permission of SKYLIGHT PATHS PUBLISHING.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Foreword xi
Introduction xv

1. God Beyond Religion 1
2. What Becomes of Prayer If There Is No God? 13
3. From Belief to Faith 27
4. Jesus: The Way, or in the Way? 39
5. Why Didn't Someone Tell Me I'm a Mystic? 51
6. Inspiration Is Not Dictation 65
7. Morality As Right Relationship 77
8. What Problem of Evil? 89
9. Church with a Mission, Mission with a Church 103
Epilogue: A Spiritual Epoch on the Rise 115

Acknowledgments 119
Notes 121
Suggestions for Further Reading 125

What People are Saying About This

teacher; spiritual director; author, Decision Making & Spiritual Discernment: The Sacred Art of Finding Your Way - Nancy L. Bieber

"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."

best-selling author, Speaking Christian and Evolution of the Word - Marcus Borg

"A remarkably clear distillation of wisdom about what it means to be Christian in the twenty-first century."

author, God the What?: What Our Metaphors for God Reveal about Our Beliefs in God - Carolyn Jane Bohler

"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."

Rev., PhD, founder and senior fellow, The Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation - Tilden Edwards

"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., PhD, Canon to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church; author, A Dangerous Dozen: 12 Christians Who Threa - C.K. Robertson

"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. Dr., PhD, minister emeritus, First Congregational UCC, Colorado Springs, Colorado - James W. White

"[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."

Editorial Reviews

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.

Read the Spirit - By David Crumm

"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 Publisher

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.

American Library Association Booklist - Ray Olson

"Open, passionate and expansive.... This adventuresome exploration of new life beyond the rules of institutional Christianity is a fine work to be appreciated."

Spirituality & Practice