Читать книгу God for an Old Man - Thomas M. Dicken - Страница 5

Over the years, I have been able to work through my thoughts about some important topics in academic journals. I am grateful to all those journals for enabling my work to go ahead. Inevitably, the result of those years is implicit in this book.

In some places, that earlier work is very explicit in these pages. My concluding chapter originally appeared in 2015 as “God for an Old Man” in Process Studies. My chapter “Dying: An Interim Report” first appeared in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal. I had been told in May, 2006 that I had lymphoma, and perhaps had a year to live. I needed to write about that. I wrote my essay in August, 2006. I’m glad I did and I’m glad my article appeared in Soundings and is also in this book.

I have been working through my ideas for over fifty years. My article “The Homeless God” in the Journal of Religion was a breakthrough for me, allowing me to break with the last constraints of a traditional view of God as omnipresent and strike out on my own, finding my own way. The four chapters in the “Adult Thoughts” portion of the book have developed from ideas first explored in that article. My chapter on John Updike’s Seek My Face develops insights first explored in part of my article “God and Pigment: John Updike on the Conservation of Meaning” in Religion and Literature in 2004.

Paragraphs and pages from other articles also appear, scattered throughout these pages, though none of those is reprinted here in such detail. The articles were influential and suggestive as I wrote this book. In particular my thoughts about art and literature emerged in various articles. All of my relevant journal articles are listed in the Bibliography section of this book.

All biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version.