Rainer Maria Rilke, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Emily Dickinson, Albert Camus, Sigmund Freud and the "Tao Te Ching" are just some of the influences on this remarkable and beautiful book, which brings poetry - the language of what it is not possible to say - to bear on theology, in such a way that it changed the author's life. Suddenly, like Lewis Carroll's Alice, Alves found himself going through the looking glass and discovering how words cannot be marshalled into conventional forms but are rather like wild birds flapping their wings refusing to be caged. In delivering the 1990 Edward Cadbury...

This is the book which first generated international celebrity and notoriety for its author, and which fire-started a debate about the supernatural claims of Christianity. Rejecting Christian doctrines and metaphysics in favour of the religious consciousness which characterises human identity, Cupitt 'takes leave' of God by abandoming objectice theism. Whatever one thinks of the author's views, and of the non-realist beliefs he has been seen to champion, Taking Leave of God remains an essential work, and one of the most controversial theological interventions of its age.