Mystery without Magic: Finding Faith in a Secular World

New edition, revised and expanded!
Where do we find meaning and value in our lives? Do we really need to choose between a religion that asks us to believe incredible things and a secularity that asks us to relativize value?

This book takes readers on a quest, a thought-journey in search of a faith that can provide a foundation for values in our secular and uncertain age. As our guide, author Russell Pregeant invites us to open ourselves to a different consideration of religious language—a more primal language that appeals to the shared world of human experience and points us to a depth dimension of life that transforms our ideas of reality itself. Using secular and biblical literature, Pregeant outlines how process-relational thought can help us to experience this transformation. He never asks us to make a leap of faith, or to ignore evidence, or to believe without reason. Instead, he suggests that rethinking the traditional idea of God can lead us to a vision of the divine that makes sense and that unifies the various strands of our lives, bringing together our external knowledge of the secular world with our internal intuitions of meaning and value. With helpful diagrams to illustrate his ideas and putting-it-all-together study questions for each chapter, this book is perfect for church or spirituality study groups, as well as independent seekers.

We live at a time of great spiritual need. For those leery of a magical, otherworldly religion, Pregeant offers a this-worldly alternative: the human self as part of the cosmic whole, and a process-panentheistic-relational God whose defining characteristic is Love.