Dedication & Publishing Information

 

For Libby, John, Jim, and Cathy

 

This large format edition of Beyond Belief is being published as of July 2007. A standard book format edition, with notes and an index, is scheduled for publication in March 2008. It will be available for $17.95 postpaid from Norwich Center Books, P. O. Box 710, Norwich, VT 05055. Tel. 802-649-1451.

 

http://clintgardnervt.googlepages.com

 

Photograph of Orozco fresco on front cover is reproduced with permission.

Commissioned by the Trustees of Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire.

 

Copyright © 2007 by Clinton C. Gardner

 

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Epigraphs

 

God is the power which makes us speak. He puts words of life on our lips.

 

Everybody who speaks believes in God because he speaks. No declaration of faith is necessary. No religion.

 

Speech is nothing natural; it is a miracle. 

 

Speech is the body of the spirit.                     

                                                               — Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973)

 

Spirit—the Holy Spirit—is incarnated in human life, but it assumes the form of a whole humanity rather than of authority....God is like a whole humanity rather than like nature, society, or concept.                                           

                                                                — Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948)

 

 

Christianity wholly consists in the fact that God’s work has become the work of man also. This unity between God and man is the kingdom of God, which comes only in so far as it is realized.                                                          

                                                               — Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900)

 

 

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Acknowledgments

    

Norwich, Vermont – July 14, 2007 – As befits a work that presents the spirit as speech, and introduces a dialogical method, this book is the product of numerous dialogues. While many of these were one-on-one, I’d like first to recognize those that occurred in various discussion groups, ones that I and friends of mine organized, either at local churches or at Dartmouth College, just across the river from this small Vermont town.

      Most of the church discussions were held at the Norwich Congregational Church, beginning in the fall of 1963; and they often had an ecumenical character, with members of Catholic and Episcopal churches joining in. All of them focused on reading innovative thinkers in the field of religion, persons who contributed to that new Christian paradigm which I describe in the Prologue.

      In 1981 it was a discussion group at the Norwich Church that led to the formation of the Bridges for Peace project, thus creating this book’s whole Part II.

      In more recent years I’ve shared key pages of this work with a men’s breakfast group, one that’s been meeting since the early 1990s at the Norwich Inn. Organized by my friend Don Poulson, who invited men from local churches, it has the same ecumenical character that we had back in the 1960s.

      Then several chapters owe a lot to discussion groups that were sponsored by the Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth (ILEAD). Indeed, Chapter 12’s engagement with Sam Harris’ 2004 The End of Faith was prompted by a spring 2007 ILEAD discussion of that book.

      A third local venue for helpful discussions was provided by the Kendal at Hanover retirement community. In 2006 there was a series of meetings at Kendal on issues of religion and science, focusing on the rise of fundamentalism in the US today. These were led by Fred Berthold of the Dartmouth Religion Department—and helped me with those issues in Part III.

      Besides the dialogues in those varied groups, there were certainly some individuals whose one-on-one conversations with me were equally critical for this book. My cousin Peyton Craighill, an Episcopal priest, introduced me to the widely-admired writings of New Testament scholar Marcus Borg, thus leading me to hear him live at the January 2007 conference in Georgia which I report on in Chapter 12. With help from Peyton and the others noted below, the last three years have finally brought me to the present text.

      My wife Libby’s common sense has toned down certain excesses, while conversations with my children—John, Jim, and Cathy—have aided me in sorting out which notes were most usable. Then grandson Kyle Morrison designed the cover.

      Beyond my immediate family, certain friends who were quite familiar with my subject helped me shape this work. Freya von Moltke gave me many hints, as did Harold Berman, Fred Berthold, Darrol Bryant, my nephew Ray Huessy, Giles Jackson, and Harold Stahmer.

      I’ve also profited from readings and critiques by Sally Bradlee, David Briggs, Sonja Hakala, Mary Jenkins, Carl Johnson, David Keane, Anne Margolis, Peg and Avery Post, and Ken Wolf.

      Finally, I owe a debt of gratitude to my academic friends—George Kline, Jim Scanlan, Andrzej Walicki, Caryl Emerson, and Jonathan Sutton—for helping me re-enter their world of Russian philosophy, as I do in Part II. And a special debt to my Russian academic friends whose welcome of my little book Between East and West: Rediscovering the Gifts of the Russian Spirit made possible the story told there. Sergei Averintsev, Alexei Bodrov, Tanya Blagova, Sergei Horujy, Konstantin Ivanov, Vitaly Makhlin, Volodya Maliavin, and Sasha Pigalev played critical roles in that story.

      The text was typed by Ruth Stalker, who also was the Office Manager of Bridges for Peace.

      So thanks to all, to family and friends, to scholars here and abroad. Whatever I’ve discovered here owes much to my dialogues with all of you.

 

 To continue, click: Prologue

 

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