John Shelby Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of Newark before his retirement in 2000. As a visiting lecturer at Harvard and at universities and churches throughout North America and the English-speaking world, he is one of the leading spokespersons for liberal Christianity. His books include Jesus for the Non Religious, Sins of Scripture, A New Christianity for a New World, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Resurrection: Myth or Reality?, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, , and his autobiography, Here I Stand. He has initiated landmark discussions of controversies within the church and has become an outspoken advocate for change.
"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"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"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"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"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"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"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"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"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"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
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