God of Love and God of Reason: Homilies Lectures and Essays on God and Religion

These homilies lectures and essays vigorously champion the authors conviction that it is reasonable to believe in a God of pure unbounded love and also that the best religion is a reasonable religion. That is the God of Love is the God of Reason and as a seventeenth-century Cambridge preacher put it If you would be religious be rational in your religion. Thus these essays challenge both the New Atheists and Fundamentalists who are twins like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. And they aim positively to unpack the meaning and implications of Jesus dictum: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. David Mason proceeds from two assumptions: that his listeners are too intelligent to be satisfied with spiritual platitudes and that they are too humble to avoid challenging theological insights. Having been blessed for a decade in the hearing of his homilies it is an equal blessing now to re-read them paired with his academic essays. --Alan M. Gates Episcopal Bishop of Massachusetts David Mason eloquently expresses his rational faith in a personal and feeling fashion. He cares about a life-giving religion that makes sense to the contemporary critical mind. He spells it all out for us in a lyrical even pastoral way all the while respecting all healthy skepticism. This is the kind of writing and thinking that makes me want more. --Ed Bacon Rector All Saints Church David R. Mason is Professor Emeritus of Theology and Religious Studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland. He was also for forty years priest associate at St. Pauls Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights Ohio. He is the author of two books Time and Providence (1982) and Something That Matters (2011) and numerous journal articles. David and his wife Margaret live in Pasadena California.