The following are books that received favorable reviews in Parabola. If you would like to order any of these works, please click on the title of the book.

Most religious traditions recognize the inadequacy of human language for describing the divine. Augustine wrote that “God is thought more truly than can be uttered, and exists more truly than can be thought.” How, then, can we hope to speak rightly about God? Catholic feminist theologian Elizabeth A. Johnson asserts that all language about God can be understood properly only as metaphor and symbol; at best it opens our minds to, points us toward, and participates in the reality of holy Mystery. Johnson’s latest book, Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, incorporates a wide variety of fresh, rediscovered, and compelling images of God that seek to accomplish just this. Although highly respected in academia, she writes to a broad audience, eschewing jargon and embracing experiential approaches to Christian theology: interreligious, Hispanic, black, feminist, liberation, transcendental, trinitarian, political, and ecological. As Johnson recognizes in the introduction, “Women and men yearn for a relationship with the living God commensurate with their aspirations, competencies, and struggles in our perilous times. Stale, naïve, worn-out concepts of God no longer satisfy.” In the vein of Thomas Aquinas, she advocates approaching God with many names as a reminder that no one turn of phrase will ever capture all of God for all time. The quest for God endures because of God’s own living nature, the evolving milieu of human society, and the eternal longing to glimpse and grasp the one in light of the other.

—Jenn Cavanaugh

THE GARDEN OF TRUTH: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition
Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Harperone (www.harpercollins.com), 2007. pp xvi+272. $24.95

Seyyed Hossein Nasr is one of the world’s leading scholars of Sufism, Islam, and world philosophy.  Now in his seventy-fifth year, he has authored more than fifty works and hundreds of articles and has received numerous honors in the fields of religion and philosophy.  He has also been, since his boyhood in Tehran, intimately involved in the spiritual reality of Sufism. The present work may be understood as the seamless conjoining of both these threads of concern: at once scholarly and vitally engaged, it is not so much a book about Sufism as a book of Sufism, a Sufi treatise in the tradition of classical Sufi works, but composed in a contemporary language.  The result is an elegant, accessible summary of the Sufi way, by turns deeply informative and profoundly moving.

—Peter Samsel

GURDJIEFF: A Master in Life; Recollections of Tcheslaw Tchekhovitch

Of all the great spiritual teachers of the twentieth century, G. I. Gurdjieff is perhaps the one who has inspired the richest collection of memoirs. The latest to be published, by Tcheslaw Tchekhovitch, who studied with Gurdjieff over a period of twenty-eight years, is not the most brilliant, but it is an inspiring portrait of the often difficult and paradoxical “master in life.”

In 1920, after the collapse of the anti-Bolshevik forces in the Russian Civil War, Tchekhovitch, a Polish officer fighting on the losing side, fled to Constantinople, where he made contact with Gurdjieff and was drawn into his circle, finally coming to live in the large household of pupils that had begun to accumulate around the master.

Tchekhovitch’s memoirs chiefly consist of a series of sharply defined anecdotes about Gurdjieff in a wide range of circumstances: healing a boy who was starving to death despite (or rather because of) the excessive amounts he was eating; berating Russian exiles for their vain hope that they would be able to return to their homeland soon; and above all, expounding upon seemingly insuperable “demands of the way.”