Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell – A Spiritual Autobiography on God, Death, and Belief

Drawing on a lifetime of wisdom, New York Times bestselling author and controversial religious leader John Shelby Spong continues to challenge traditional Christian theology in Eternal Life: A New Vision. In this remarkable spiritual autobiography about his lifelong struggle with the questions of God and death, he reveals how he ultimately came to believe in eternal life.

How does one journey past the limits of religion to find an authentic, modern belief in eternity?

• The Meaning of Mortality: Walk with Spong through his own personal encounters with death, from childhood to his work as a bishop, as he deconstructs the fears that shape traditional belief.
• Beyond Heaven and Hell: Why the traditional, behavior-controlling concepts of reward and punishment must be abandoned to find a mature spirituality.
• A New Vision of God: Discover a God not as a supernatural, external being, but as the Ground of All Being—the source of life, love, and consciousness in which we all participate.
• The Path of the Mystics: How the mystical tradition, from the author of John’s Gospel to today, points to a universal consciousness that transcends death itself.

John Shelby Spong, the Episcopal Bishop of Newark before his retirement in 2000, has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard and at more than 500 other universities all over the world. His books, which have sold well over a million copies, include Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy; The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic; Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World; Eternal Life: A New Vision; Jesus for the Non-Religious, The Sins of Scripture, Resurrection: Myth or Reality?; Why Christianity Must Change or Die; and his autobiography, Here I Stand. He writes a weekly column on the web that reaches thousands of people all over the world. To join his online audience, go to www.JohnShelbySpong.com. He lives with his wife, Christine, in New Jersey.