John Shelby Spong,  whose books have sold more than a million copies, was the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark for 24 years before his retirement in 2001. A longtime champion of progressive Christianity, Spong is a visionary voice in the religious community, calling people to step beyond boundaries of tribe, prejudice, gender and even religion to create a new humanity. His latest book, Jesus for the Non-Religious (Harper San Francisco, March 2007), expands his vision for a radically reformed Christianity, peeling away dogma to reveal the essence of Jesus. It is a new, deeper and more powerful exploration of the Jewish Jesus, about which he first wrote in his classic This Hebrew Lord
John Shelby Spong’s lifelong quest to rescue the church from irrelevancy has led admirers to hail him as champion of inclusive faith, and detractors to vilify him as a heretic. It is not a desire to destroy faith, however, that drives Bishop Spong, but rather the longing of a “God-intoxicated” mystic to enter the mystery that is Jesus Christ. “Jesus stands not only at the center of my faith, but at the center of all that I am,” he says. “My commitment, however, is to the reality of Jesus as a God experience, not to the reality of the traditional explanations.”