Reviews
'Sparkling with personal anecdotes and nurtured by a wide range of scriptural scholarship, Spong's book deconstructs conventional religion and then fashions a new Jesus consonant with modern consciousness.' ? Hal Taussig , author of A New Spiritual Home: Progressive Christianity at the Grass Roots (Daniel H. Gregory, M.D., Senior Attending Physician, Bassett Healthcare), Eternal Life: A New Vision doesn't actually give us a clear vision of eternal life at all. Spong would never do that.... Instead he frees us to dream a dream of what life, eternal or otherwise, might be., "With subtlety and complexity, Spong promotes an idea of an ongoing existence beyond our physicality, one that entirely supercedes "religious" notions of Heaven or Hell and even conventional notions of God . . . Spong's writing here as elsewhere is intelligent, engaged, comforting, and uplifting. ", His courage, candor and intense awareness are unique gifts to people both inside and outside Christianity at this critical time in human and planetary history., Spong invites us to engage the questions, to revel in the mystery, and finally to find our place within God's place, our time within God's time, and our life within God's life., This work, bound to be influential, offers new insights into religion's big questions about life and death, making an invaluable contribution to both religious scholarship and faithful exploration., "Spong once again puts his intellectual money on common sense . . . Religion's purpose, he claims, is "security, not Truth" - a key insight that demands, in turn, a set of wholly new visions. . . . Spong . . . [is] a unique visionary.", John Shelby Spong, the reinterpreter of Christianity for the doubtful, retired as the Episcopal bishop of New Jersey in 2001 but not from his religious provocations. . . . People have to get beyond the idea of God as a heavenly judge who hands out rewards and punishment,., In Spong's perpetual quest for truth and knowledge, he has transformed the enigmatic cosmic energy of the 'big bang' into an afterglow of human hope for the ages., Spong has spent his life and work making sense of this most fundamental human issue . . . His fans will find this spiritual autobiography fascinating, but so, too, should anyone interested in the still uncomfortable topics of death and mortality., Eternal Life: A New Vision doesn t actually give us a clear vision of eternal life at all. Spong would never do that.... Instead he frees us to dream a dream of what life, eternal or otherwise, might be., Fear of death is the most fundamental fear of human existence. The only way it can be conquered is through knowledge and experience of your eternal being. Eternal Life: A New Vision is elegant invitation to find this part of yourself and be liberated., 'Sparkling with personal anecdotes and nurtured by a wide range of scriptural scholarship, Spong's book deconstructs conventional religion and then fashions a new Jesus consonant with modern consciousness.' ? Hal Taussig , author ofA New Spiritual Home: Progressive Christianity at the Grass Roots(Daniel H. Gregory, M.D., Senior Attending Physician, Bassett Healthcare)
