Sympathy for Yahweh: Creative Interpretations of the Book of Job

Creative, challenging, funny and transformational.


In Kenya, underneath a hot tin roof in tropical heat, a voice in a dream literally tempted author Alan Wildsmith to interpret the Book of Job. In Sympathy for Yahweh, you join Alan - a practicing psychotherapist, writer, creative cookie, and complete biblical novice - on a dynamic journey of discovery. Many feel alienated by biblical religious doctrines and dogma, especially if their spiritual experiences have been disregarded by others, by frameworks, or by interpretations of holy texts. Oddly enough, though, Alan discovered that when you seriously engage the Book of Job, the very foundations of organised religion shudder. With humour and self-reflection, and from unique perspectives, Alan’s book will bring you into a fresh, vital, and most importantly, unshackled relationship with our Western God. It’s not just the dogmatic side of religion that this book shakes up but also dogmatic scientism, which pervades the Western psyche, casting away intuitions, dreams, synchronicities, visions, and other felt senses as superfluous - the more feminine aspects of our psyche - and while on the journey he had with this biblical book, Alan found femininity a subtle yet strong theme. Sympathy for Yahweh is for anyone interested in philosophy, religion, spirituality, and psychology. If an atheist can find faith in this book, so can a religious zealot! Everyone is welcome.

Alan Wildsmith is an author and a psychotherapist. His special interest areas are dreams and dreaming, transference, visions, synchronicities and the unconscious in general. He lives in Durham in the North East of England, where a dream is the foundation of that magnificent hall of stone, Durham Cathedral.