I’ve been reading Be Love Now and I love the way Ram Dass is revisiting his early experiences with Maharajji, looking back at the beginning, filling in the blanks in between the layers of the stories we’ve heard before. When I think about those first awful weeks after his massive stroke, when we didn’t know how much brain function he would recover and the prognosis looked grim, and then read the way his memories pour out in the new book, I’m so grateful for the round trip Ram Dass been able to make.

“In our age that so frequently worships perpetual adolescence, Ram Dass’ work is a welcome contrast. His book’s principle strength is that it reflects his long life of regular spiritual practice. As an almost-octogenarian, Ram Dass’ most-recent reflections have a gravitas that wasn’t possible when he was forty years younger.” Christian Pastor and Spiritual Director Carl Gregg offers our first post in our Blogger Roundtable on this month’s featured book selection, Be Love Now, by Ram Dass.

This week, we launch the new featured selection of the Patheos Book Club: Be Love Now, by Ram Dass. In the coming weeks, we’ll be posting reflections from a variety of bloggers about the book and “the path of the heart” that has been Dass’ spiritual journey. Today, we share some contemplations from Ram Dass as a way of introducing our featured book.

“As a theologian myself, I am inclined toward the larger questions that Prothero avoids. I will grant that given the immense diversity of our pluralistic world, we need to be honest about the major differences between religious traditions, and I applaud Prothero’s ongoing project of combating religious illiteracy. Nevertheless, after finishing his book, I was left wanting a larger framework for reflecting on how all the religious differences hang together.” Pastor Carl Gregg joins our blogger roundtable on “God Is Not One.”

“I find it amusing that following the selection of Stephen Prothero’s God Is Not One, some Christian writers have scurried to assure people that he doesn’t really mean that. Of course God is One!” Pagan Portal Manager Star Foster offers a passionate response to our bloggers’ reviews of God Is Not One, by Stephen Prothero.

“I fundamentally agree with Prothero’s thesis that religions are manifold; but as a theologian, I take a slightly different path that embraces both the kataphatic and apophatic aspects of religious experience — the affirmation that God is revealed in all things and can be symbolized by many things, while being more than anything we can imagine.” Progressive Christian Bruce Epperly on the book God Is Not One.

“While the book actually does serve as a good survey book of various religious traditions, I want to focus on his Islam chapter. Because the chapter is so strong, I want to highlight some of the outstanding points he makes, and point out some minor criticisms.” Our blogger roundtable on God Is Not One continues with Hussein Rashid…

“The hardest part of reading this book for me came not as a Hindu, but as an interfaith activist.” Hindu blogger Padma Kuppa is the next responder in the Patheos Book Club blogger roundtable on “God is Not One.”

“I had five roommates my freshman year of college. Three of them were Jewish. And one was more involved in Jewish student life than the rest. So one night, I asked her if she’d be interested in a conversation to compare our religious beliefs. I was cross-legged on the bed. She pulled the chair out from my desk and turned to face me. “Let’s start with the basics,” I said. “What do you believe about God?” Our blogger roundtable on God Is Not One continues with a review by Amy Julia Becker, author and blogger at Thin Places.

“For those of you who are scoffing at this type of perennialist thinking, and who are hard polytheists and the like, I’d invite you to take a step further and start looking at your own vocabulary: how often do you speak in terms of “the divine” or “deity”? While that’s not as egregious as saying “We’re all one,” nonetheless, it buys into what is ultimately a monistic understanding of divinities and divine realms and realities.” Our second blogger reflects on Stephen Prothero’s book God Is Not One.