A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Diana Butler Bass traces a movement from imagining God primarily as a distant being ‘above’ the world toward encountering divine presence through ground, water, sky, home, neighborhood, and shared life. Blending history, reporting, memoir, and constructive theology, she interprets declining institutional affiliation alongside the growth of immanent, ecological, and place-rooted spiritual experience.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
It gives Christian-origin travelers language for experiences in which the sacred feels nearer in the world than in inherited institutional or supernatural frameworks. The book can connect spiritual change with attention to place, ecology, embodiment, and neighbor rather than treating departure from conventional religion as mere absence. It is a bridge from vertical religious imagination toward an immanent Christian theology of presence.
Good starting place if…
God-language still matters to you, but divine presence now feels more credible in nature, place, relationship, and ordinary life than in a distant supernatural hierarchy.
Know before you begin…
Bass offers a constructive interpretation of contemporary spiritual change, not a representative survey of unaffiliated people or proof that institutional religion is being replaced by one shared spiritual revolution. Her immanent Christian framing remains a theological destination. Readers should distinguish reported cultural patterns, personal narrative, and the book's own claims about where God is found.