Finding Your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up With Has Lost Its Meaning - Softcover

Scotty McLennan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060653469 ISBN 13: 9780060653460

Publisher: HarperOne, 2000

Synopsis

An Indispensable Guidebook for Those Seeking a New Spiritual Path, or Wishing to Reconnect to the Religion of Their Youth

About this title

Review

Finding Your Religion is a guidebook for the perplexed--those who have lost faith in the religion of their youth and are not sure how to continue their spiritual lives. The book's author, the Rev. Scotty McLennan, has plenty of experience with the perplexed; he is a Unitarian minister and the chaplain at Tufts University. (He has also inspired and entertained millions of people indirectly, as the model for the freewheeling character Reverend Scott Sloan in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury.) McLennan has structured Finding Your Religion on a model of six stages of faith--Magic, Reality, Dependence, Interdependence, and Unity. The book describes each of these stages in detail, drawing on McLennan's experience with students' spiritual searches and on his own search (which led him, among other places, to Harvard Law School and to ashrams in the Far East). McLennan's prose is clear and direct; he is very open to exploration, and very tough on laziness. "Pick a religious path and start walking," he writes. "Even if it turns out not to be the right way later on, you won't get anywhere spiritually without starting." --Michael Joseph Gross

From the Inside Flap

Starting with my own experiences in college in the 1960s and divinity school in the early 1970s, I have learned a great deal about how people lose and find their own religion. Ive come to see it very much as an ongoing process that never stops. For many people, the faith they grew up with loses its meaning during adolescence. Others who never had any faith in childhood begin exploring religion for the first time in adolescence or young adulthood. Ive come to realize that there are identifiable stages of spiritual development that people go through, no matter what their religious tradition is or isnt. Just as we grow emotionally and intellectually over the years, so we grow spiritually, if we allow ourselves.

Tufts University Chaplain, Scotty McLennan (the inspiration for *Doonesburys* Reverend Scot Sloan) offers an indispensable guidebook to those seeking a new spiritual path or wishing to reconnect to the religion of their youth. He reassures anyone at a spiritual crossroadsthose who have become disillusioned with or even abandoned the religion of their youththat finding a relevant and fulfilling spirituality is a process of understanding ones place in any of six universal stages of faith: Magic, Reality, Dependence, Independence, Interdependence, and Unity. He offers signposts and checklists for determining where readers are on their own spiritual journey and for helping them grow and develop. By recognizing a progression of steps toward a faith of ones own choosing, McLennan explains, one can more fully open ones soul to its spiritual destiny.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0060653469
• ISBN 13: 9780060653460
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 256