An old enough book to have no prior entry on Goodreads and even no ISBN(!), this is the work of a scholar of religion who found he took to Unity. I attended a Unity service in Birmingham in 2010 or '11. Someone asked if I was a first-time visitor and upon my yes I was gifted a single dethorned rose with a note expressing my value. Many affirmative statements of one's own value are made in Unity and really all of New Thought (Christian Science, Divine Science); some of their more mystifying beliefs arise out of this affirmative posture. One can't help but picture a man covered in bedsores who suffers a stable trajectory of decay until his eventual death, uttering loudly that "Every Cell In My Body Is Filled With Christ Consciousness, I Do Not Inherit Sickness, I Am Health Embodied by the Spark of God Within Me, I Am Whole and Well," or perhaps succumbing to his disease mid-sentence... In Prosperity is found a similar, albeit less unbelievable doctrine.

And yet there was a simple joy of experiencing Affirmative Prayer in action. That same year, I called in to Silent Unity once; I was too far removed from belief in a deity to listen with any openness to the prayer they spoke for me over the phone.

Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Tarot (and Jung's archetypes) continue to appeal to me more, as exercises in esotericism go, as they are practices of the mind and conscious efforts to attain a higher spirituality for oneself by using one own mind. To rely on one's religious viewpoint to provide wealth or health, or to do as Unity does in insisting they exist where all evidence states they are lacking, is to exceed my willingness to play along. ( )