“The focus and goal of our efforts,” Norman Wirzba, a professor of theology at Duke University Divinity School, urges in The Sacred Life, should be “the transformation of the desires and habits that are rendering our only world uninhabitable.” This world, “in which life happens,” he adds, “is a sacred world.” “Humanity’s fundamental vocation,” Englewood Review of Books declares in its critique, “is to bear witness to God’s love for creaturely life, and to commit to the construction of a hospitable and beautiful world.”
According to George Pattison, chair of divinity at University of Glasgow, writing in Britain’s Church Times, “Wirzba directs us to becoming rerooted in the earth, and…to welcome and honour the other creatures we encounter in it with ‘attunement, enjoyment, and delight’.” He adds: “Wirzba writes lucidly, and moves easily from science to scripture, philosophy, and theology…. I found myself cheering aloud at many points….”
“To me,” Gijsbert van den Brink reports, reading This Sacred Life “was a very rewarding and inspiring adventure.” In his review for Holland’s Henry Center for Theological Understanding, he found that the book “testifies to the author’s great wisdom,” and that it’s “laced with profound insights, articulated in highly quotable one-liners.”
This Sacred Life: Humanity’s Place in a Wounded World
By Norman Wirzba
Cambridge University Press, 2021
