In
A Progressive’s Guide, T. Collins Logan explores the progressive attitudes and activism of the New Testament that were radical in Jesus’ time, and continue to encounter the same resistance among religious conservatives today that they did in the first century. Each chapter begins with selected passages from the New Testament that relate to specific themes. Readers are encouraged to evaluate those passages using a straightforward method of interpretation, and to draw their own conclusions. Relying on careful analysis of the text, the historical context of early Christian writing, and his own immersion in Christian faith as a young man, T. Collins then offers his own insights into Biblical ideas and the Christian experience.
Some of these insights are provocative, some are challenging, and some have far-reaching implications, but all of them advocate an ongoing evolution of spiritual and religious understanding grounded in compassion. To what end? T. Collins proposes that truly progressive ideas enhance individual and societal wholeness and well-being, continually improving a greater good that transcends religious affiliation or belief. As a mystic, he is most interested in uncovering the heart of a universal spiritual understanding, and effective ways of expressing that understanding in individual and collective action. In A Progressive’s Guide, he demonstrates persuasively that the New Testament is a rich repository of constructive and progressive ideas, ideas that spring from the very essence of being human, and which inherently oppose rigid codes of behavior, overreliance on tradition, and institutionalized spirituality.
"I think a lot of folks, including me, have assumed at one time or another that religious institutions - including their most radical adherents - are somehow created or inspired by the core teachings of the spiritual traditions themselves. For example, that fundamentalist Christians angrily demonstrating outside an abortion clinic are basing their anger and judgmental attitudes on the words and example of Jesus Christ. Or that jihadists are basing their violent activism on the teachings of Muhammad. Or that the oppression of women is some sort of universal aspect of all spiritual faith, and so forth. But really, I think this is a misunderstanding. Much more often, many attitudes, oppressions, prejudices and hatreds that seem to be associated with a given religion are really the product of the culture within which that religion is operating. Or they are the byproduct of the power structures of religious institutions, which again are often more informed by the surrounding culture than by the faith tradition itself. So in order to get to the heart of what a given spiritual belief system teaches, I think we need to go back to the source - at least as much as we are able to. In the Christian tradition, that means revisiting the Bible, and in particular the New Testament. But to do this without the "cultural blinders" that color our interpretation with longstanding assumptions, we need a new method of interpretation that relieves us of those prejudices. And that's what I've tried to define and apply in A Progressive's Guide, offering a stark contradiction between the ways modern Christianity often operates, and what the authors of its scriptures clearly intended."
