“I borrowed a copy of this book from a friend,” Kay Campbell wrote in an Amazon appreciation of John Philip Newell’s A New Harmony, “and ended up returning it almost immediately, because it is impossible not to read without underlining.” [She so loved the book, she got her own copy.] “For many years,” Calgary’s Wisdom Centre observed when, in 2015, it brought him to Banff to lead a retreat, he “has been teaching the sacredness of being.”
As he does in this volume: “In this visionary work,” according to Spirituality & Practice, “Newell calls Christians to a fresh sense of…the oneness which builds us all together…. For Newell, the new holiness is wholeness.” Religion book author Barbara Brown Taylor agrees: “He is able to see the divine wholeness in our clearly fractured reality….[and] articulate that wholeness so that we can see it, too.”
Newell grew up in Canada—born in Chatham, Ontario, he once served as McMaster University’s chaplain—but found his way to Scotland, studied theology in Edinburgh, and was ordained a Church of Scotland minister. Once warden of the iconic Iona Abbey in that country’s western isles, he, nowadays, “speaks of himself as a wandering teacher,” Earth & Soul mentions.
A New Harmony: The Spirit, The Earth, and The Human Soul
By John Philip Newell
Jossey-Bass, 2011
