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Well, the books are on very different subjects, but I'm not happy with being classified as New Agey, nor would I have been when I wrote the book.

In the golf book I talk about other religions a little bit, about paradox, and about mysticism in general, which is not a specifically Christian phenomenon. I was a mystic before I was a Christian. I was born mystic. And the final thing that was involved in my conversion was reading Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism. That was the first time I really became aware of the extraordinary richness of Christian mysticism. After that I started thinking that maybe I ought to get baptized.

I still dragged my feet for three years. My baptism was a kind of death for me, and nobody likes to die. I used every rationalization in the book. And the best one was that I couldn't decide whether I was going to be baptized as an Orthodox or a Roman Catholic or an Episcopalian or Presbyterian or American Baptist or Southern Baptist. That complex denominational decision was obviously going to take me 25 or 30 years of research to figure out, but I realized that was a cop-out—that baptism is not a denominational celebration.

If you'd asked me if I'd ever become middle-of-the-road anything, I would have thought no, I never would have. But then I became very much a middle-of-the-road Christian. The people who don't like me, are the ones at the fringes. Fundamentalists don't like me. But neither do the serious immanentists that deny the transcendent aspect of God, nor the serious transcendentalists who deny the imminent aspect of God. God is full of paradox. Mysticism is full of paradox. But God resides both inside of us in that still small voice and simultaneously outside of us in all of his or her transcendent magnificent otherness.

Among other things, the New Age movement totally fails to deal with evil. The three monkeys might be the symbol for the New Age movement.

And its bible is A Course in Miracles. There is some absolutely superb Christian psychiatry in it, but it's also channeled material that has two strikes against it right away. A Course in Miracles denies the reality of evil. And in a sense, good and evil are the ultimate paradox. People have a great deal of trouble with paradox. And they don't like to deal with evil.

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January (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49