Writer, scholar, educator, and poet Andrew Harvey brings to this book the same passion, full-throttle-ahead energy, and ecstatic vision he demonstrated in The Way of Passion: A Celebration of Rumi (1994). Son of Man is a demanding examination of Jesus that begins with an affirmation of contemporary biblical scholarship on this mystic revolutionary and then spins dizzyingly outward into a four-part map of the journey into Christhood, a tribute to Christ and the divine feminine, and concludes with 31 meditations on the mystical Christ.

Harvey's Son of Man, as he calls Jesus, is a radical who "combines the deepest mystical absorption in the divine with the most absolute and selfless work for justice and compassion in the world." He hurrahs Jesus' open embrace of women and the feminine; his inimitable condemnation of violence, hierarchy, and power games; and his severe critique of the patriarchal family system.

Far and away Harvey's most distinctive contribution to the ongoing assessments of Jesus of Nazareth is his commentary on him as "the Sacred Androgyne, who fuses the 'masculine' and 'feminine' in his own being to engender a uniquely powerful and all-encompassing realization and to birth a new kind of divine human being." Equally compelling is his outline of five approaches to the mystic Motherhood of Mary.

Harvey's best work is saved for last when he shows how 12 sacred practices (including mantra, the Jesus prayer, centering prayer, adoration of the sacred heart, the rosary, and birthing of the Divine Child of the Mother) enable us to sustain a direct relationship with Christ. Bold, untraditional, imaginative, and practical, this presentation of the mystical path to Christ takes the less traveled road to transformation and transcendence.