A Progressive’s Guide to the New Testament

In A Progressive’s Guide, T. Collins Logan explores the progressive attitudes and activism of the New Testament that were radical in Jesus’ time, and continue to encounter the same resistance among religious conservatives today that they did in the first century. Each chapter begins with selected passages from the New Testament that relate to specific themes. Readers are encouraged to evaluate those passages using a straightforward method of interpretation, and to draw their own conclusions. Relying on careful analysis of the text, the historical context of early Christian writing, and his own immersion in Christian faith as a young man, T. Collins then offers his own insights into Biblical ideas and the Christian experience.

Some of these insights are provocative, some are challenging, and some have far-reaching implications, but all of them advocate an ongoing evolution of spiritual and religious understanding grounded in compassion. To what end? T. Collins proposes that truly progressive ideas enhance individual and societal wholeness and well-being, continually improving a greater good that transcends religious affiliation or belief. As a mystic, he is most interested in uncovering the heart of a universal spiritual understanding, and effective ways of expressing that understanding in individual and collective action. In A Progressive’s Guide, he demonstrates persuasively that the New Testament is a rich repository of constructive and progressive ideas, ideas that spring from the very essence of being human, and which inherently oppose rigid codes of behavior, overreliance on tradition, and institutionalized spirituality.