Duke Robinson

A Middle Way: The Secular / Spiritual Road to Wholeness Duke Robinson

This book spells out a coherent worldview that can help you be real in the twenty-first century.  Rather than try to reconcile religion and science--the two, competing worldviews that dominate our American consciousness--the author tracks a path between them, embracing the unique contributions of each while avoiding the shortcomings of both.  In the end, it clarifies what we must do to have  the light and warmth we all need and be fully human.

The author says he has found that a lot of intelligent people believe some very strange, even foolish, things that render them divided, out of touch with reality and locked in incoherence.  He claims that the worldview upon which he elaborates, and which he identifies as Secular Spirituality, offers grounding, integration, balance, and liberation to ...

• those who have given up what they used to believe and now tend to believe nothing or just about anything, and who feel incomplete, fractured or empty;

• those who are holding on to whatever they were taught as children and are disturbed by knowing that it doesn't hold water any more;

• those who so need to be right that they are afraid to consider the significance of the mysterious cosmos of which we are only recently aware;

• those whose worldviews, in bondage to either sentimental religion or secular science, fail to provide them both the light of truth and the warmth of grace we all need, and who find themselves in the dark or out in the cold;

• those who live one day a week believing in the enchanted forest world of their religion and live the other six days as if the natural, cause-and-effect world is real, knowing all the while that to tolerate such internal contradiction is unhealthy;

• those who gave up sentimental religion for all its silly, superstitious beliefs but have found nothing to replace the warmth and deep sense of belonging it offered; and

• those who are as fanatical about their secularism, or scientism, as the worst of religious zealots.

Robinson covers such diverse subjects as angels, quantum physics, religious and scientific arrogance, the Death of God, sentimentalism, tests for truth, dogma, bizarre spirituality, the process of secularization, idolatry and worship, science run amok, faith and reason, and ethics.

He says you do not need an advanced degree to discern his "middle way," but he does ask you to think.