Rollan's Censored Issues Blog

A BOOK OF UNUSUAL EXPERIENCES AND ANSWERS

My new book, Cosmic Father: Spirituality as Relationship is now out and available on Amazon.com. Though many authors like to call their book exceptional, this one unquestionably is so starting with the fact it combines claims to direct experience of the divine with the kind of intellectual inquiry into God and Bible that almost never accompanies such. It broaches questions like:

• How and why did Christianity, the religion that prays “Our Father”, become a Son religion to the extent it scarcely addresses or knows this Father?

• What is God, and God as an interacting Trinity, like? Answers go beyond conventional ones like God is love and the Trinity just a sacred mystery.

• Why suffering? While there can be no complete answer to that question there is one that Christian philosophers almost consistently ignore but which explains most and is the most logical answer rather than the total mystery and “God’s Problem” that skeptics like Bart Ehrman make it..

• What about God and eros?

• What is the meaning and function of prophecy?

• Who and what precisely is Yahweh and is there a Godhead beyond God?

• How and why have popular religious writers on God like Jack Miles, Karen Armstrong and Deepak Chopra got it wrong about God?

TO ORDER
Cosmic Father can be ordered on Amazon.com by entering either the book's title or the author's name.

BACKGROUND
On professional advice Cosmic Father has gone onto Amazon direct because it could be assumed the difficulties and delay of issuing such an unusual book through conventional channels whether secular or religious would be too great – necessarily so I now think. I have been told by a currently bestselling author of a book on God that he went through 36 publishers and many agents before having his book accepted. The simple and controversial fact many would doubtless deny (but which is only what I more or less heard at the Society of Authors lecture a good few years ago), is that mainstream publishing industry isn’t interested to publish relative to God or Christianity unless negatively, gnostically, skeptically. I hope this is wrong but I have seen and experienced enough to believe otherwise.

I am pasting below the book’s back cover blurb and a list of chapters titles. (I expect to put a few excerpts from the book onto the Net at least on my Rollan McCleary website, if not a separate site devoted to it, but all such may have to await the assistance of my usual helper in web matters who is presently dealing with acute problems keeping them from all work).

BLURB

What does it mean to talk about, talk to, or be addressed by, God as Father? Is it even any longer helpful or meaningful in an era of inclusive gender language, high personal autonomy and a new pop atheism? Is there any awareness to be had beyond the new age guides to God consciousness, prolific “conversations with God” or the literary deconstructions of divine character from such as Jack Miles and Harold Bloom?

If Milton’s justifying the ways of God to man was always problematic, to argue for the existence and concept of God as specifically Father is still more difficult today. There is everything to consider from the apparent case against God in light of events like the Holocaust to feminist objections to a patriarchal God. There are therefore some high barriers to pass before anyone can hope to perceive the biblical God as Creator and Father. And this may require re-examining how and why we read the Bible as we do, listen to some philosophers we do and discovering if there a line in divine “thought” behind the Bible’s more difficult stories and reported acts of God.

This very original book offers a wide ranging, challenging mixture of reflections along with an open ended inquiry into God’s “character” and the nature of visionary/prophetic experience that has traditionally most claimed to reveal this. But the quest is also one prompted and illuminated by sudden, unexpected contact with “The Father” that the author is left forced to process along with a thoroughgoing examination of what is signified by the Trinity. Whether or not the reader would accept the testimony to personal experience that influences some of the conclusions drawn, it is still an impulse towards gaining some original insights and the quest engaged can deliver some real, perhaps life changing, surprises.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 Divine Contact

CHAPTER 2 “Our Father in Heaven” but What Sort?

CHAPTER 3 Human Suffering, A Hidden Secret Doctrine and Hell Itself

CHAPTER 4 Divine Character by Names

CHAPTER 5 Biography and History of God

CHAPTER 6 How God “Thinks”

CHAPTER 7 Reading God between the Lines

CHAPTER 8 Things the Magi Didn’t Tell You

CHAPTER 9 Losing the Father

CHAPTER 10 Finding the Father and What It All Means