God Has a Dream

December 15, 2003
Reading this book is like having a long, and somewhat homiletical, afternoon tea with former Archbishop of Cape Town and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Tutu. Four years after No Future Without Forgiveness
, Tutu's reflection on his role as Chairman of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, comes this deeply personal book that Tutu calls "a cumulative expression of my life's work." Each chapter begins "Dear Child of God," and goes on to reflect on vulnerability, transfiguration and the human condition with winding anecdotes from Tutu's personal and public life, stories he delivers with his trademark humor and a deceptive simplicity. For example, when Tutu says we are all one family, what emerges is not some churchy optimism, but a highly developed theology of relationship, what Tutu has earlier called ubuntu
("a person is a person through other people"), with political as well as interpersonal implications. This book is highly readable, perhaps because, like other Tutu books, it is culled in large part from lectures and sermons delivered in Tutu's very public life. That this book aims for more than an afternoon tea becomes clear at its close: we are God's partners, Tutu exhorts. We are humanized or dehumanized in and through our actions toward others. Tutu grounds this appeal most concretely, ending with a list of Web sites from organizations that need more partners for their outreach.

November 1, 2003
Inspiration from a Nobel laureate.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2004
Admired throughout the world for grace, generosity of spirit, honesty, and humility, Archbishop Tutu has witnessed much evil, particularly in his native South Africa, and has been threatened with death. He has also seen much good, and here he emphasizes that. Many find his dream that the world's people will realize they are all members of one family--God's family--rather utopian, but he heartily disagrees. He believes in the genuine possibility of his dream, and he uses the Feast of the Transfiguration to express the goodness--the power of God's transformation--that undergirds the world and that has already made the cross, once an instrument of death, the source, for Christians, of eternal life. No one is beyond God's love and grace, the archbishop assures. He also discusses the nature of evil and goodness (one cannot exist without the other), free will, moral responsibility, individualism, capitalist culture, sexism, racism, forgiveness, suffering, and mortality. Goodness will prevail, he believes, and his small, inspiring, empowering book will make others believe that, too.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)