This short text seeks to replace a fall-redemption account of the Christian faith with one based on evolutionary emergentism. Such schemes tend to remind one of the work of Teilhard de Chardin, but major influences on this book would seem rather to be Matthew Fox's Original Blessing, Thomas Berry's The Universe Story, and the work of Ilia Delio, considered below through her latest book.
In 1852 an American medium, Maria Hayden, crossed the Atlantic, landed in London and began offering séances in fashionable salons. From this point on, and certainly well into the twentieth century, spiritualism proved attractive to many. What spiritualism offered was, primarily, an extravagant claim: that it was possible for the living to communicate with the departed. By various means, people from all classes, religious traditions and geographical locations ‘tried’ the spirits, seeking to make contact with famous characters from history or departed family members. Spiritualism offered, sometimes, spectacular signs and wonders: flying furniture, levitating mediums and ghostly presences, all of which attracted the attention of journalists. Fashions for such signs came and went; the claim to communicate with the dead, however, remained at the heart of spiritualism.
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