Ursula King, professor and director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Religion and Gender in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Bristol, England, is a biographer (Spirit of Fire) of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). She regards him as "truly one of the least well known and most ignored Christian spiritual writers of the present age who, with a great visionary vigor, foresaw many of the material and spiritual issues that have to be addressed in the new twenty-first century."
This French Jesuit theologian and paleontologist created a unique synthesis in his writings of spirituality, science, philosophy, and religion. Yet at the same time, the fervor of his faith was forged in mysticism and expressed in a deeply sacramental and incarnational vision of the universe. "All that I shall ever write will only be a feeble part of what I feel," he once observed.
In this incandescent collection, Ursula King presents the sweep and the grandeur of Teilhard's theology. The paperback is divided into four sections: discovering the divine in the depths of blazing matter, living in the divine milieu, seeing Christ in all things, and the awakening and growth of the spirit in the world. Here Teilhard unspools his earth-centered spirituality, which encompasses zest for life, soul-making, cosmic consciousness, universal communion, divinization, and love's threefold dream. This volume is part of Orbis's Modern Spiritual Masters Series.
