Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness

"Love Beyond Belief is a hope-filled book reminding us in historical and contemporary terms that we are loved always, even when we feel lost and alone." -Desmond Tutu

Using insights from the brain science of emotions, Love Beyond Belief: Finding the Access Point to Spiritual Awareness narrates two millennia of lost-and-found stories about love beyond belief as the access point to the heart and soul of spiritual life. Many of today's "spiritual but not religious" people - one in four US adults - have found the access point to spiritual experience that Western Christianity lost: unconditional love. Love Beyond Belief tracks the history of this lost emotion.

Thandeka has written Love Beyond Belief with two goals in mind: to resolve the emotional-deficit problem in so many "corpse cold" (Ralph Waldo Emerson s words) mainline congregations today; and to offer a primer for "spiritual but not religious" people to build up and network their spiritual communities.

"Thandeka has written a book of rigorous scholarship, brilliant original insight, and great practical importance. ... Having read it, I will never be able to think of my theological heritage in the same way again. ... Thandeka sees in the emergence of the "spiritual but not religious" community a great potential for her goal of "love beyond belief." She has demonstrated in practice how, by paying close attention to the affects, dying established churches can come alive. She hopes that those who are alienated from these churches, often for excellent reasons, can develop community activities that will lead them to experience love beyond belief. With her leadership and the support of progressive churches, perhaps this project will succeed." -From the foreword by John B. Cobb, Jr., Center for Process Studies

Thandeka is creator of the Love Beyond Belief initiative for progressive congregations and the founder of Contemporary Affect Theology. Her books and publications have secured her place as a major figure in American liberal theology. Formerly an Emmy award-winning television producer, she is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and congregational consultant who was given the Xhosa name Thandeka, which means "beloved," by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1984. Thandeka received her Ph.D. in philosophy of religion and theology from Claremont Graduate University.