This is a masterful and engaging account of how humans through centuries and cultures have engaged and experienced the divine. Our doctor is Muslim, our lawyer Jewish our best friend Buddhist, a plurality multiplied by global travel and politics. In "Like Catching Water in a Net", Webb discussed how humans have described the Divine. This companion book looks at how humans have engaged the Divine across religions and centuries, through ritual, art, sacred places, language and song. Here, Webb includes her own experiences, both personal and observed from travel in fifty countries, as well as centuries of theology, literature and travel writing. She meanders along winding trails, talk over the fence and drink wine with a stranger, literally and figuratively. To engage the larger-than-description Sacred, we need all the stories we can find, even if only to remind us the distance still to go and the limitless (sometimes unsuccessful) journey. As a teacher of world religions and art, and an artist, this will not be a string of anecdotes, but a woven together, reader-friendly, vividly painted, theologically reflective whole.

Author Biography

Val Webb is a university lecturer in religion, with a graduate degree in science and a Ph.D. in theology. She is the author of 7 books, most recently, Florence Nightingale: The Making of a Radical Theologian. Her book John's Message: Good News for the New Millennium was commissioned by the World Methodist Council. Dividing her time between the U.S. and Australia, she teaches every year at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Whitley College in Melbourne.