A View from the Back Pew God, Religion & Our Personal Quest for Truth

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Overview

Since the time Tim O'Donnell was a nuisance to the nuns, he has been asking questions about religion. He went on to become a successful owner of daily newspapers and consulting firms, but the questions remained. So at age forty, he sold his businesses, built a log home in the woods, and dove headfirst into the taboo questions of Christianity-not as a theologian but as an investigative reporter. The answers surprised him.

A View from the Back Pew explores the issues we all encounter on our spiritual journey:

* Are spirituality and religion the same thing?
* Is guilt a necessary part of ...

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Overview

Since the time Tim O'Donnell was a nuisance to the nuns, he has been asking questions about religion. He went on to become a successful owner of daily newspapers and consulting firms, but the questions remained. So at age forty, he sold his businesses, built a log home in the woods, and dove headfirst into the taboo questions of Christianity-not as a theologian but as an investigative reporter. The answers surprised him.

A View from the Back Pew explores the issues we all encounter on our spiritual journey:

* Are spirituality and religion the same thing?
* Is guilt a necessary part of the religious experience?
* Do the rules of religion actually bring me closer to God?
* Will open-minded inquiry help or hinder my spiritual progress?
* Is God a concept? A reality? A Myth?
* Did God create man? Did man invent God?
* If mankind's capacity to understand the world has advanced exponentially in the last two thousand years, shouldn't our spiritual understanding be evolving too?
* And, perhaps most importantly, am I looking for God in the right places?

Candid, humorous, and at times controversial, O'Donnell takes us on a powerful search for balance-between faith and personal experience, between the roots of Christianity and later layers of doctrine, and between systems of belief and a direct connection to the spiritual presence we call God. In this bold quest for truth, you'll delve into everything from the "mystery” of the Trinity and the Virgin Birth to celibacy in the priesthood to Jesus' key teachings about "the kingdom” and the real purpose of prayer. "My hope,” writes O'Donnell, "is that if you are drawn to the Divine but labor over dogma, doctrine, and ritual, you will find support and a fresh perspective in my view from the back pew.”

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780984534418
  • Publisher: Linchpin Publishing
  • Publication date: 3/1/2011
  • Pages: 280
  • Sales rank: 848,000
  • Product dimensions: 5.50 (w) x 8.40 (h) x 0.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Tim O'Donnell owned and ran a daily newspaper publishing company and won dozens of newspaper publishing awards for excellence. He has also been an organizational consultant, university lecturer, and keynote speaker. In addition, he has led workshops and seminars on leadership and personal and organizational development. He now keeps busy writing, blogging, speaking, and engaging others in meaningful dialogue.

Tim and his wife, Lynn, make their home in Kansas City and have three children. To learn more about Tim O'Donnell and his work, visit www.AViewFromTheBackPew.com

Read an Excerpt

My year in "Walden Woods” turned into almost seven.

I was finding more and more satisfaction and connection through my reading, discovering my own deeply rooted and very personal spirituality beneath a mass of unnecessary book learning about religion. This mass was like a tumor pressing on a vital organ, and it wasn't easy to remove. Eight years of grade school
(nuns), four years of high school (priests and brothers), and three years of college (Jesuits), capped by a climactic year of studying in Rome (more Jesuits)-after all that, I finally understood that
"religion” wasn't working in sync with my own knowingness about the Spirit within me. Instead of teaching me to embrace this knowingness, my training had taught me to trust religion and distrust myself when it came to spiritual truth. It was shocking, but somehow wondrously liberating, to uncover the hold that religion had on my life.

All of those years, the knowingness I'd felt at critical junctures of life was the "voice” of God guiding me. Now I was sensing a deepening relationship with God, but at the same time coming to understand that "God” was just a word, just a name for an entity that was becoming more and more personally available to me. I wasn't using ritual or relying on a third-party institution to be the go-between between "God” and me. I approached Him directly and I found Him patiently waiting inside of me.

I had always believed that I was made up of part flesh and part
"something else.” I realized, when I bypassed the rituals, that the
"something else” was a direct link to the Universal Intelligence that religion calls God. This link, this Spirit, was not something that needed to be awakened (it had never been asleep), just affirmed and acknowledged in a new way. Finally, after years spent stuck in a system of belief that did not and could not evolve, my mind was evolving to connect to the One Universal Mind behind all that is.

I came to the conclusion that organized, doctrinal religion-
and specifically, from my point of view, Catholicism-if adhered to unthinkingly and never questioned, has the power to keep an individual from knowing God. Knowing religion is not knowing God.
Religion maintains the myth of duality by its very nature; it can be no other way. Most religious systems are transactional, when in fact their founders were not engaged in transactions-they were transformed by their own experience, which they tried to share.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

1 Doctrine and Dogma 1

Taking Mysteries on Faith

2 What is God? 17

Infinite Intelligence and Our Ascending Urge

3 Discussion and Doubt 33

Looking for God in All the Wrong Places

4 What is Religion? 51

Putting God on Paper

5 Disillusion and Discovery 71

The University of Life

6 What is Christianity? 85

From Deposit to Doctrine

7 The Deal 103

When in Rome…

8 What is the Trinity? 121

The Math behind the Mystery

9 Rise and Fall 131

Down Payment on the Deal

10 Who are the Clergy? 143

Personnel "Matters"

11 The Deal Delivers 161

God's End of the Bargain

12 Who is Jesus? 185

Christ Consciousness and the Kingdom Within

13 Discerning the Divine 211

Out of the World and into the Woods

14 Practicing Oneness 239

The Conversation of Our Life

Epilogue 253

Acknowledgments 259

Notes 263

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