Hello, merry and mystical friends!
In this video I make an embarrassing confession, and then I introduce my new book: My Burden Is Light: A Pastor’s Plea for Rationality, Honesty, and Humility. The book was a labor of love; special thanks go to the reading group at the Open Prairie United Church of Christ in Princeton, Illinois, who read and discussed an early draft. They put up with me as their pastor, even though I am both a wild-eyed Christian mystic and a skeptical and irreverent heretic. (But I don’t suppose Merry Mystic subscribers will be surprised on either count!)
Hello, Adam –
I was drawn to an ad for your book in The New York Review of Books because I love the title and because I am a student of The Urantia Book–see http://www.urantia.org–and I always appreciate efforts to rid Christianity of its many false, erroneous, and irrelevant accretions. I am a retired Anglo-Catholic priest whose spiritual life–in addition to my long-standing meditation practice–has been saved by The Urantia Book. In Fact, I call it my Bible, given that what we think of as the Bible is in fact a very abridged and distorted version of the truth. Before I buy your book, I wonder if you would be open to a conversation.
Hoping your new year is off to a good start.
(The Very Rev.) Christopher Ross+
212-464-7059
Hi Christopher,
And bright blessings on your new year! The kind person who placed that ad in the New York Review of Books will be glad to hear that it didn’t go unnoticed.
I started The Urantia Book once, but I’ve never finished it. I very much sympathize with the understanding of Jesus reflected in Part IV, but I couldn’t really engage with the elaborate mythology and cosmology. Maybe I just didn’t understand it — but on the whole, I prefer not to speculate so much about such things. Just following the way of Jesus seems like more than enough of a challenge for a lifetime.
Please feel free to email me directly, if you want to continue this conversation.