A Closer Look at New Age Spirituality

This book by Rob Frost was one of those I read with a classic almost-ex-evangelical mixture of cynical apprehension of heresy and roiling curiosity. I've borrowed it from the communal research & training library at work, and if the subtitle is anything to go by, it will live up to this mixture of expectations - as holism and psychotherapy I have no doubt Christianity is fully compatible with the ultimate findings of, but - ley lines? astrology?

   It's interesting from the offset to note that this book's author was in the same position as me when he began researching it. He wanted to debunk all the 'New Age nonsense', as is so much the trend in contemporary christian circles, but as he dug he found more and more commonality, potential insight into things like our relationship with nature and our own minds and bodies (which Christendom-form christianity often wasn't very good at talking about in healthily educational ways), and challenges of basic phenomenology that New Age mysticism is, in many ways, better-equipped to deal with than 'correct-theology' obsessed forms of modern church thinking, and therefore better able to connect with any persons or ideas outside of these modes and communities.

   There's a lot in this book and I won't pretend to bother summarizing it. I'm still on the whole retaining a broad sense of caution in approaching new ideas, but I've never been a shirker from them, and this has been no different - in many ways from reading this book I feel much more affirmed in the core sturdy reality of Christianity to respond to things we may perceive to be alien, but - do we really need to then perceive them as hostile? Or - is this going too far? - incompatible? At root, New Age thinking believes in the possibility of a set of practices and attitudes which can unite humanity and bring about a superior form of human civilisation. This potted summary, were it to contain a mention of Jesus, would also pretty perfectly describe Christianity's God-intended secular impacts. So whatever you may think about it all (assuming here that most of the readers of my blogposts about Christian books are Christian, sorry if you're not, God loves you btw), I'd recommend this book to any persons of faith who suspect grains of truth may exist anywhere else, to be discovered and brought into the larger whole which the gospel forms the core to. Because I certainly believe they do.