Now available on Kindle

The Lost Way to the Good is now available on Kindle, as well as in paperback and hardback.

https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Way-Good-Dionysian-Platonism-ebook/dp/B09TY2BSJN/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1646649667&sr=8-1

In case you haven’t heard of it yet (in which case, I haven’t been pestering hard enough), it’s a book about metaphysics: the nature of reality – which is to say, in Christian terms, that it is a book about God, because we can’t discuss what is truly real in abstraction from God. It isn’t just “academic” speculation in the pejorative sense of the word.

To paraphrase the sadly neglected but great Anglican theologian of the twentieth century, Eric Mascall, if we make mistakes in our theory of God, then all our talk about the Incarnation of Christ, Christian ethics, the nature of the Eucharist, prayer and so on will be mistaken, too. That’s not to say that we can “understand” God, but if we don’t make our best effort to articulate rationally what we mean when we talk about God, then all of our other suppositions will be like houses built on sand.

What I’ve tried to do in The Lost Way to the Good is show where modern ideas of God have historically gone wrong, basically making Him the “supreme being,” a greater and more powerful, spiritual version of us. I go back to the older, in my view more defensible Platonic theory which helped Christians, Jews and Muslims from Andalusia to China make sense of reality, and informed their spiritual practices for engaging with that reality. In the end, I take us all the way to Japan, and tentatively explore how a sound doctrine of God can help counter certain Buddhist arguments against the theistic religions, and bring the Abrahamic and far Eastern faiths to a closer understanding of one another and of what truly is. I

want us to be able to stand together against the divisive and corrosive effects on society and the environment that so much of modern, Western, technologically-driven “progress” is causing, and I think that the Eastern Platonic tradition can help us towards that end.

If that sounds good to you - or if it sounds bad enough that you want to refute it! - then the book’s only a few clicks away…