Overview: Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century: A New Guide for the Perplexed by author George C. Adams, lays out a path to belief for the 21st century citizen who cannot embrace either the traditional religions of the past or the emerging religions of the new spirituality.

Verdict: The crisis of 21st-century religion is upon us. With fewer people remaining committed to traditional religions and most new religious movements in their infancy, where does that leave the vast “silent spiritual majority” who find the old religions to be obsolete and the new religions to be not yet credible?

For everyday people who feel lost between a rejected religion of the past and a still obscure religion of the future, Thinking About Religion in the 21st Century suggests that there is indeed another way to look at religion, fully informed by 21st-century sensibilities, that requires no sacrifice of the intellect or abandonment of moral sensibilities.

The old religions can be set aside, and the religions of the future might not yet have evolved into something worthy of full commitment, but there already exists a viable, evolving alternative spiritual perspective, grounded in the elements of everyday, ordinary human experience, already available.

Thus, and in one of the most engrossing, informatively in-depth, and with definitively profound prose throughout, what we have here is a book that may well be steeped ambitiously with chapters overflowing within such subjects as consciousness and quantum physics, but yet at the very same time should easily appeal to all those with a curiosity bent toward religion, science and, on a much larger scale, the future of humanity.

In short, what author George C. Adams tries to do here is showcase all those that have a footing in religion, science and spirituality, that their beliefs don’t have to be just based around secular materialism and time; space and energy. For if they do fully believe that, and wish to hold steady to such a belief that spiritual reality is due solely to human imagination and speculation, the question posed should always be: Where did the notion of spirituality come from originally?

And sure, some people may say So what? For some people hold a religious perspective, whilst others do not. In our supposed post-modern world, where there is room for diversity without (or almost without) limits, why should this be a problem?

Well, as we are told, and quite simply, the problem is that those who adopt this stance that intellectual and moral integrity in the contemporary world and incompatible with religious beliefs are: 1) simply wrong, and 2) unnecessarily denying themselves the benefits of a spiritual worldview, a perspective that offers a level of depth, meaning, and insight into existence as an embodied human creature that secularism simply does not and cannot provide.

In short, what the author is suggesting is that there are real, unique and profound human goods that flow from a belief in Spirit. And so this book will make you think, without a shadow of a doubt, about all you know, and that, above all else, is the sign of a most brilliant book, I think you will all agree.

About the Author - A graduate of Fordham University, Dr. George Adams is an adjunct Professor of Religion at Lycoming College and Susquehanna University.

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