Finding God Beyond Religion: A Guide for Skeptics, Agnostics & Unorthodox Believers Inside & Outside the Church (Walking Together, Finding the Way)
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