I’m not hearing much about this book, but I suspect we will be hearing the conversation soon. Brian McLaren has a new book out called Finding Our Way Again. The subtitle is The Return of the Ancient Practices. Brian’s is a book introducing a series of volumes (one of which is mine on Fasting) on the spiritual disciplines.
Classic and vintage Brian, yet it is not at all more of what we’ve already heard in his recent books. This is a book where Brian moves into spiritual practices. It swallows up the ancient practices into a holistic sense of spirituality. FOWA forms a brief introduction to the books in this series, yet it does so in a way that it reads completely as a book on its own.
He has a chp on Jesus and one on Paul: “instead of reading Jesus primarily in the light of Paul, we need to read Paul primarily in the light of Jesus” (41). A chp called “Open-Source Spirituality.”
His chp on Shallow Trouble, Deep Trouble is the most balanced approach of Brian’s I’ve seen yet on kingdom now and heaven in the future, on kingdom and salvation. He seeks for a 3d Way: mutuality that combines the contemplative way and the activist way.
He uses a few chps to sketch his bigger vision of spirituality and then explores the disciplines that will appear in this series of books. And then we get chps on katharsis, photosis (illumination), theosis (unity with God) … well, that’s enough.