[<i>What to Believe</i>] leaves the reader with a sense of hope in an impossibly dark long-term future. The book is warmly recommended — not only for the argument that it puts forward, but also in the hope <br />that this might prompt an intellectually rigorous alternative vision.
Church Times
John Caputo is one of the foremost postmodern philosophers of our time. In this brilliant book, he offers a provocative new way to think about God and an invitation to awaken to a new reality: we are entangled with God. Playful, witty, and radically profound, this is a book to return to over and over.
- Ilia Delio, author of <i>The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole</i>,
Here is a book that countless people who have given up on the God of their childhood will relish. Tired of living in the shallow end of the theological pool, Jack Caputo invites us all to push out into the deep waters of radical theology without letting us sink. What you are about to read is God-years ahead of its time.
- Rev. Robin R. Meyers, author of <i>Saving God from Religion: A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical World</i>,
An evocative, accessible, good-humored guide to living (and moving, and being) after the death of God.
- Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of <i>Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race</i>,
Writing in a lucid and witty style, Caputo offers a bold account of a “radical theology” that is anything but what the word theology suggests to most people. His point of departure is autobiographical, describing growing up in the world of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, serving as an altar boy, and spending four years in a Catholic religious order after high school. Caputo places Augustine’s Confessions, Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith, and Jacques Derrida and postmodern theory in conversation in the service of what he calls the “mystical sense of life.” He argues that radical theology is not simply an academic exercise but describes a concrete practice immediately relevant to the daily lives of believers and nonbelievers alike. What to Believe? is an engaging introduction to radical theology for all readers curious about what religion can mean today.
This Is How the World Began
First Week
Lesson One: God Does Not Exist
Lesson Two: Bridge-Builders and Ground-Diggers
Lesson Three: That’s Pantheism, That’s Horrible
Lesson Four: Do Radical Theologians Pray?
Lesson Five: The Mystical Sense of Life
Lesson Six: Who Do They Say Jesus Is?
Second Week
Lesson Seven: Suppose Everything Just Vanished?
Lesson Eight: What Is Really Going On?
Lesson Nine: What Is Going On in the Name of God?
Lesson Ten: Whether God Will Have Been
Lesson Eleven: Making Ourselves Worthy of What Is Happening to Us
Lesson Twelve: So What?
A Parting Word (or Two): Yes, Yes
Further Reading
Index