Description: A leading Christian liberal and pioneer for human rights challenges traditional theology and takes readers on a journey beyond religion to give his answer to the question of life beyond death.
Brief description:
John Shelby Spong, the Episcopal Bishop of Newark before his retirement in 2000, has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard and at more than 500 other universities all over the world. His books, which have sold well over a million copies, include Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy; The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic; Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World; Eternal Life: A New Vision; Jesus for the Non-Religious, The Sins of Scripture, Resurrection: Myth or Reality?; Why Christianity Must Change or Die; and his autobiography, Here I Stand. He writes a weekly column on the web that reaches thousands of people all over the world. To join his online audience, go to www.JohnShelbySpong.com. He lives with his wife, Christine, in New Jersey.
Review Quotes:
"Offering deeply personal reflections on his own Christian journey and priestly career, Spong reviews a lifetime of passionate engagement with biblical study and with questions of faith, charting his growing discomfort with language that seemed limited, falsifying and inadequate...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." - Publishers Weekly
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"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, he said. Spong never specifically defines what life after death will be like --- he thinks that can't be done --- but he tells of his own experiences of the ineffable and relates those to eternal life. Spong, known as a religious rationalist, admits he has become something of a mystic." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"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, ." - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"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." - Anglican and Episcopal History
"Spong wants to carve out a new Christianity, one that marries belief in God with sober scientific inquiry. Spong doesn't want to address either fundamentalists or atheists; he wants to find the disaffected Christian in the middle, the person searching for a faith that embraces the discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein. . . . He asks his readers and audiences the same question he has asked himself all of his life: 'Is there another option?' Spong has faith there is." - Charlotte Observer
"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." - Central Coast Express
"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." - Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing
"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." - Daniel H. Gregory, M.D., Senior Attending Physician, Bassett Healthcare
"Spong once again puts his intellectual money on common sense, buttressed both by the scientific method and the discoveries it yields. . . . Religion's purpose, he claims, is "security, not Truth" - a key insight that demands, in turn, a set of wholly new visions. . . . Spong's approach lets us see his growth from a narrow (racist, fundamentalist and homophobic) Southern childhood into the role of a public thinking man with a profoundly educational mission. And indeed, one of the book's most valuable chapters comes last, a persuasive and lyrical case for the right to make one's own end-of-life decisions: Bishop Spong will chair his own death panel! In any event, when the day comes, thinking humans will be deprived of a unique visionary." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"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." - St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"What Spong says is his "fifth 'final book'" concerns life after death and the meaning of mortality. In its "internal narrative," he recalls gaining his first awareness of death, that of a pet when he was three, and with it the devastating lesson that when something or someone dies, they disappear forever. Spong has spent his life and work making sense of this most fundamental human issue, and he discusses the selfconsciousness involved in the adoption of religion to cope with the finality of death. Some observations are humorous: he makes gentle fun of the birthday card and cosmetics industries' attitude toward aging. More often he offers thoughtful, serious commentary on topics that include the rise of liberal politics and secularism, the religious approach of the mystics, and the Resurrection as symbol and reality. He concludes with the rather courageous belief that individuals be allowed to determine when and how to die. His fans will find this spiritual autobiography fascinating, but so, too, should anyone interested in the still uncomfortable topics of death and mortality." - Booklist
"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." - Booklist
"Spong, the controversial retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark, NJ, may rightly be considered the bellwether of the most advanced opinions in theology that still cling to a nominal Christian identity. 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. For conservative Christians, Spong's views are heretical; for many other readers, Christian and non-Christian, Spong's writing here as elsewhere is intelligent, engaged, comforting, and uplifting. VERDICT Spong's thought and theology are crucial stimulants for every thinking Christian; an important book. " - Library Journal
"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. " - Library Journal
"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." - Deepak Chopra, author of The Third Jesus