Making Peace with God: A Practical Guide

Bloomfield and Goldberg manage to take a comprehensive and heartfelt perspective on a very sensitive subject: how do we explore and understand our relationship with God? They ask the hard questions from many different viewpoints in a way that invites us to ask those same questions of ourselves--what do we expect of God, how do our own attitudes of God color our vision of God? Ultimately the authors show us ways to find peace within ourselves and with the Divine by both challenging us, and empathizing with us, as we explore and strive to reconcile our connection with God. The book was rich with stories, metaphors, humor and pathos, allowing the reader to connect with this delicate issue in many different ways. I highly recommend it! --Susan Quinn

I'll admit I approached this book with some skepticism. I initially feared that the authors were bringing a feel-good, self-help approach to a subject that demands considerably more gravitas; and in any case "God" has not been an operative term in my vocabulary for some years now. I was pleasantly surprised. Bloomfield and Goldberg skillfully mine sources both Eastern and Western, scriptural and secular, and extract an expansive definition of God (or rather an expansive appreciation of the undefinability of God) that blows past the usual Sunday school Superbeing that has sent so many intelligent people running for the exits. There's a lot of warm humor and feet-on-the-ground spiritual pragmatism here. One innovation that I found particularly helpful is the idea, adapted from the Enneagram, of nine types of people (the Reformer, the Lover, the Boss, etc.), who all find different dynamics at play in their quest for the infinite, with different resources and different challenges. As the authors caution, everyone has elements of more than one type, but these psychological portraits can still be extremely valuable in pointing up limiting patterns and assumptions that we have been so locked into that we don't realize we're locked in. Once you see these patterns, you're a good part of the way toward transcending them. This is a useful book that will open doors for people who care about a relationship with God, and for many who think they don't.