Religion - United States

Working on God

Name: Working on God
Author: Winifred Gallagher
ISBN: 9780375755378

by Winifred Gallagher

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Overview

Millions of Americans are finding it more and more difficult to apply the traditional demands of organized religion to their lives, and yet a complete absence of spirituality leaves them uneasy. Working on God is a book for and about such intelligent, independent people, who are seeking to reconcile their spiritual yearnings with their skeptical intellects. Winifred Gallagher, a behavioral-science reporter, began her investigation of religion in our postmodern age with research and interviews and soon discovered a vast, quiet revolution under way among ordinary men and women grappling with the sacred. Both Gallagher's brilliant journalistic inquiry and her very personal journey unfold over time spent in a Zen monastery and a cloistered convent, in small-group discussions and healing rituals, in a Conservative synagogue that shares spaces with a Christian church, and in the birthplace of the New Age. Written with humor, empathy, and a rigorous curiosity, Working on God breaks new ground in depicting the broad-based spiritual movement that is transforming many lives.

Synopsis

New Age Journal

[An] extensive exploration of American spirituality at the crossroads. Gallagher is writing for all people...who fit in the steadily growing category of what Gallagher calls 'neoagnostics.'... If you are seeking to explore some of those seemingly inexplicable metaphysical feelings, read Working on God. Gallagher has written your book.

About the Author, Winifred Gallagher

Winifred Gallagher's previous books are Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Create the Individual, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Power of Place: How Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. She has written for many magazines, from The Atlantic Monthly to Rolling Stone. She lives in Manhattan and Long Eddy, New York.

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Editorials

New Age Journal

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

A self-described "neoagnostic," Gallagher (Just the Way You Are) takes her readers with her as she "works on God," her phrase for trying to find where religion fits in her life. On one hand, she finds the traditional Roman Catholicism in which she was reared too embarrassing for an intellectual to profess. On the other hand, she feels she needs some kind of spirituality to find meaning in life. Her approach is an eclectic one. Sampling Zen Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity, she tries to construct a religion tailored to her individual needs. Ultimately, she discovers her life is so saturated by Christian language and images that she must use them as her starting point. However, she refuses to accept the doctrine of Christ's atonement. Pointing out that many of Christianity's central tenets--Christ's divinity, Christ's participation in the Trinity--were not codified until the 3rd century, Gallagher feels justified in taking for herself the title "Early Christian," as someone who can say only, "Jesus is special, but I'm not sure just how special." Gallagher's honesty and integrity will resonate with those who can acknowledge a "resurrection experience" but who can't quite profess the Resurrection. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Gallagher (Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Make You Who You Are, Random, 1997) takes the reader on her own journey of religious and spiritual discovery. Describing herself as "neoagnostic" or skeptical but searching, she participates in Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist worship or meditation and dialogs with well-known spiritual leaders. She also visits monasteries, seminaries, and the Holy Land (focusing on the Christian sites), struggles with "Jesus Seminar" ideas about the Jesus of history, and records her feelings of both "home" and estrangement in Roman Catholicism, the religious tradition of her childhood. Her conclusion is commitment to "working on God" rather than to a specific tradition. Recommended for public libraries.--Carolyn M. Craft, Longwood Coll., Farmville, VA

Nathaniel Tripp

...[S]he approaches [basic questions of existence] as a journalist who has been working the science beat for years....A fascinating mosaic of contemporary religious thought emerges....a keenly intelligent book that opened doors long kept closed.
— The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

For the benefit of the skeptical would-be faithful (dubbed here "neoagnostics"), journalist Gallagher offers an autobiographical, selectively bicoastal look at liberal religious experience in America today. Gallagher (I.D: How Temperament and Experience Create the Individual, 1996) updates Immanuel Kant's classic formulation of humanity's three principal questions (What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope?) to: What is real? What do I feel?, What are my choices? The update reflects the influence of what Gallagher calls millennial religion, by which she means those experiential, nonjudgmental, pluralistic ways of being religious that characterize the spiritual life of some, mostly urban, Americans. ("Millennial" is an unfortunate coinage for this use, since for traditional Christians it implies apocalypse, while for religious non-Christians, who measure time otherwise than from Christ's birth, it has little currency at all.) Casual and breezy language characterizes much of this self-consciously journalistic romp between such diverse religious centers as Congregation B'nai Jeshurun (a popular synagogue in New York City), the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (also in New York), and the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center (California). Gallagher's book comprises recountings of worship, meditation, and study experiences she has had at these and like religious institutions, as well as interviews with their respective leaders and flocks. The focus primarily on Judaism, Christianity, and Zen Buddhism reflects the author's confessed status as a Catholic-bred, meditation-practicing spouse of a Jewish man. The casual style breeds some errors, as in the retelling of the biblical story ofthe burning bush (which Moses turns toward initially, not away from, as Gallagher narrates), or the medieval Jewish reaction to Maimonides (who in his own lifetime never faced a serious threat of excommunication, as Gallagher implies). But the author has a good ear for the memorable remark, as of the contemplative nun who said of her life, it "is sheer faith most of the time. Very sheer." An occasionally successful attempt to capture in journalistic prose some varied depths of (post)modern religious experience. (Author tour)