Like Catching Water in a Net: Human Attempts to Describe the Divine

by Val Webb

In Like Catching Water in a Net, Val Webb is not out to prove the existence of a God or the Divine, but to set out intuitions or intimations of the Divine nature and attributes from the stories and literature of the world's religions. Casting her net more widely than Karen Armstrong in The History of God or Jack Miles in God: A Biography, Webb delves deeply into the poetry and sayings of Sufi, Buddhist, and Hindu mystics, the nature religion of the ancient Mesopotamians, their kin the Israelites, and the Aboriginal people of her own beloved Australia. Raised in the Christian fundamentalist tradition, she poses a critical challenge to the ways in which traditional Christianity has straitjacketed our Western notions of the Divine, here aligning herself with modern "mystics" like William James, Leo Tolstoy, and Florence Nightingale. In the final chapter, she shows how the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, and their contemporary followers is quite compatible with so many of the traditional notions about God surveyed in the book.

269 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 15, 2007