The Molten Soul: Conversion and Community.

books:

	• The Molten Soul: Dangers and Opportunities in Religious Conversion Gray Temple Church Publishing, 2001 - 257 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The Molten Soul: Conversion and Community.

Like one of Temple's best sermons, this is a message that one must sit with and ponder. Most of us have either observed or personally experienced what Temple describes-- an individual who undergoes a profound conversion, then becomes an artifically different person with an answer for every question and a judgmental or condescending attitude toward anyone who does not agree with them. This book will provide hope to those who have been turned off to institutional religion due to this attitude. For more traditional believers, there are many comments that could alienate them. However, if they will press on through the material that challenges their beliefs, the reader will find truth that can transform their relationship to God and to people who are different from them. Temple is also consistently fair in pointing out the risk of rigidity in all traditions-- from social activists to fundamentalists. This fairness and insight reveals that this work was not written by an elite ecclesiastic with an ax to grind, but rather by a person with deep faith and a pastor's heart. I highly recommend this book to all who will read it with an open mind-- and even more to those who need to have their certainties challenged.

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Even though he's my brother...

I found Gray Temple's book The Molten Soul the smartest concise work on the history of Christianity I'd ever seen. It's the best explanation of religious conservatism in print, and it has wonderfully interesting things to say to readers who are not preoccupied with what Gray has set out as his main problem: what to do with their own or someone else's sudden religious conversion. Gray makes his points with brilliance and humor--he's a guy who keeps his Phi Beta Kappa key next to his Slim Jims.

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The Earthy Soul

The wonderful title of Gray Temple's book has a metaphoric and layered meaning for me, much like the earth's sediments, and indeed the magma just below the earth's crust is molten. So is Gray's conception of "soul" as earthy is it is rarefied and transcendent. As a nontraditional believer, atatvistic contrarian, and long-lapsed Episcopalian, I have a little trouble with some of the theory that underpins Gray's arguments, but his writing is so rich without being dense, his good humor so evident, his knowledge so extensive yet lightly carried, that I fall easily and completely under his spell and more than willingly suspend disbelief as he spins his always compelling narrative. He joins ranks with the Thomases Aquinas, Moore, and Merton as one of my favorite writers on religion, a writer who challenges and comfortably abrades my reasoning stones. His faith and simple decency shine through his intellect, and his picture of Jesus's duality is the most complete and coherent I have ever come across. I now only await his correlative monograph on the George W. Bush administration and Dante's Inferno.

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A Book to Come Back to

The Molten Soul is Gray Temple's vivid metaphor for what happens to us Christians in our conversion moments, those times when we actually come face to face with God. With conversational warmth, Temple confronts the opportunities and problems presented by religious conversion through lenses of the Christian life, faith, doctrine, and community. He tackles questions that we all ask - such as, why are we so powerfully motivated by the fear of death and the dread of God? Once we allow God to get through enough of our defenses that we can visualize that a mutually loving, trusting, and lasting friendship is possible, what then? How do we keep our faith from ossifying into rigidity? As we encounter God's grace over and over again, how can we be spiritually ready to accept and use it to build a visionary Christian community? Where, indeed, can Job go to church?

In his foreword, theologian Walter Brueggemann writes, ". . . Temple urges `moltenness,' the process of being melted down, liquefied, rendered supple and open for new congealing that must not be too firm or full, but that readies the soul, in good gospel fashion, for the next melting that is the good work of God." Temple is a theologian, a preacher, and a priest - he meets his readers on all of these levels as he prods us to stay molten as individuals and as community. The Molten Soul makes righteousness meaningful for today. I'll be reading this book more than once.

for more information click here

The Molten Soul: Conversion and Community.

Like one of Temple's best sermons, this is a message that one must sit with and ponder. Most of us have either observed or personally experienced what Temple describes-- an individual who undergoes a profound conversion, then becomes an artifically different person with an answer for every question and a judgmental or condescending attitude toward anyone who does not agree with them. This book will provide hope to those who have been turned off to institutional religion due to this attitude. For more traditional believers, there are many comments that could alienate them. However, if they will press on through the material that challenges their beliefs, the reader will find truth that can transform their relationship to God and to people who are different from them. Temple is also consistently fair in pointing out the risk of rigidity in all traditions-- from social activists to fundamentalists. This fairness and insight reveals that this work was not written by an elite ecclesiastic with an ax to grind, but rather by a person with deep faith and a pastor's heart. I highly recommend this book to all who will read it with an open mind-- and even more to those who need to have their certainties challenged.

for more information click here

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