Events

    Monday, January 25, 7:30 p.m. What Is God?  BUY NOW In his most deeply personal work, religious scholar Needleman cuts a clear path through today's clamorous debates over the existence of God, illuminating an entirely new way of approaching the question of how to understand a higher power.   Needleman begins by taking us more than a half century into the past, to his own experience as a brilliant, promising, Ivy-educated student of philosophy -- atheistic, existential, and unwilling to blindly accept childish religiosity. But an unsettling meeting with the venerated Zen teacher, D. T. Suzuki, combined with the sudden need to accept a dreary position teaching the philosophy of religion, forced the young academician to look more closely at the religious ideas he had once thought dead. Within traditional religious texts the scholar discovered a core of esoteric and philosophical ideas, more mature and challenging than anything he had ever associated with Judaism, Christianity, and the religions of the East.   Needleman, the acclaimed author of The American Soul and Money and the Meaning of Life, is a professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, and a former director of the Center for the Study of New Religions at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.