Born-Again Deist

Research, philosophy, personal experience, and constructive re-vision season this intelligent spiritual memoir recounting poet Beth Houston’s four-decade journey “from being spiritually inclined to born-again Christian to progressive Christian to disillusioned agnostic to delighted Deist.” Broadly deconstructing “text worship,” including biblical literalism, Houston argues that religious myths, superstitions, and claims of special revelation must be transcended by a belief that does not contradict our innate, God-given faculties of reason, conscience, intuition, experience, emotion, and aesthetic sensibility, referred to collectively as common sense. Deism, literally God-ism, a humanist, minimalist religion “of God and only God,” protects the believer from presumptuous theology and from manipulation by spiritual con artists and politicians in the pockets of oligarchs who exploit religion for power and profit. Houston challenges the reader to experience a similar paradigm shift from anxious blind faith to spiritual delight derived from the integrity of common sense.