This is a masterful and engaging account of how humans through centuries and cultures have engaged and experienced the divine. Our doctor is Muslim, our lawyer Jewish our best friend Buddhist, a plurality multiplied by global travel and politics. In "Like Catching Water in a Net", Webb discussed how humans have described the Divine. This companion book looks at how humans have engaged the Divine across religions and centuries, through ritual, art, sacred places, language and song. Here, Webb includes her own experiences, both personal and observed from travel in fifty countries, as well as centuries of theology, literature and travel writing. She meanders along winding trails, talk over the fence and drink wine with a stranger, literally and figuratively. To engage the larger-than-description Sacred, we need all the stories we can find, even if only to remind us the distance still to go and the limitless (sometimes unsuccessful) journey. As a teacher of world religions and art, and an artist, this will not be a string of anecdotes, but a woven together, reader-friendly, vividly painted, theologically reflective whole.

National Best Books 2007 Award-Winner in Religion. Insightful, imaginative, and provocative! Val Webb's new book has freed the Divine from the religious. A striking achievement. John Shelby Spong, author of Jesus for the Non-Religious. In Like Catching Water in a Net, Val Webb is not out to prove the existence of a God or the Divine, but to set out intuitions or intimations of the Divine nature and attributes from the stories and literature of the world's religions. Casting her net more widely than Karen Armstrong in The History of God or Jack Miles in God: A Biography, Webb delves deeply into the poetry and sayings of Sufi, Buddhist, and Hindu mystics, the nature religion of the ancient Mesopotamians, their kin the Israelites, and the Aboriginal people of her own beloved Australia.

The recent spate of God bashers - Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris - have received their own thumping in the secular press, most notably Dawkins in "Harper's", the "London Review of Books", and the "New York Review of Books". Yet there are very few books on the God phenomenon that one would confidently entrust into the hands of readers who would be hard pressed to describe themselves as either true believers or "cultured despisers of religion". But Val Webb's "Like Catching Water in a Net" is such a book. Like Karen Armstrong in "The History of God" or Jack Miles in "God: A Biography", Webb is not out to prove the existence of a God or the Divine, but to set out intuitions or intimations of the Divine nature and attributes from the stories and poems of the world's religions.Casting her net more widely than Armstrong or Miles, Webb delves deeply into the poetry and sayings of Sufi, Buddhist and Hindu mystics. A microbiologist by early training, she is attuned to the nature religion of the ancient Mesopotamians, their kin the Israelites, and the Aboriginal people of her own beloved Australia. Raised in the Christian fundamentalist tradition, she poses a critical challenge to the ways in which Christianity has straitjacketed our Western notions of the Divine, here aligning herself with modern "mystics" like William James, Leo Tolstoy and Florence Nightingale. In the final chapter, she shows how the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshore, and their contemporary followers, is highly compatible with so many of the traditional notions about God surveyed in the book.