Thomas Bennett, a working physicist, while looking out the window of the train as he goes home from work, has a sudden revelation. A practicing Catholic from childhood, he finally understands all the ideas that have been mouldering in his head like forgotten luggage in the attic. The universe is the very substance of the divine and every moment must be joyous. Despite this, he suffers through a divorce and unemployment, to find himself finishing the manuscript of his pivotal book, The Immediate Christ, in a flophouse in Chapel Hill, NC.

With the help of friends, the book is published and starts a quiet revolution including adherents in the clergy and in other branches of Christianity. The Flying Crossbeam traces the growth of this philosophy as a detailed historical account. The author writes as a skilled historian recounting the specifics of a history with which the reader is assumed to be at least familiar. The book is about the philosophy of religion but it also carries a tone that hints at science fiction as the reader is addressed as a 23rd Century citizen with foreknowledge of the Mars colony, the space elevator system, the environmental collapse and the scientific breakthroughs bringing the environment slowly back online.

The Flying Crossbeam describes a world 200 years from now and traces the history of a fantastic evolution of Christianity. Arising initially as an isolated sect of Roman Catholicism, the Sica Movement builds upon Christian tradition and the early writings of those first Christians to form a unified philosophy that captures the imagination of thinking people everywhere. In the same way that Zen brought Buddhism to the stark here and now; and Sufism helped Islam to focus itself to a meditative point; Sica brings Christianity to the same uncompromising immediacy. An immediacy tied to what is relevant in the moment free of past prejudice and fears about the future.

In this world, humans are programmed like machines using a technique called "political engineering", and therefore the nature of the soul (what makes us human) is obscured. The U.S. has stretched its power to the breaking point and then broken; the nature of power is uncertain. Fascism has rescued failing economies only to be overthrown, and so the nature of hierarchy is unclear.

The author traces the progress of this philosophy from unwelcome cult, to underground movement to its sudden blossoming as the mainstream of Christian thought. The Roman Catholic Church is dragged into the uncommon role as beneficent mediator as it forms an open-minded and intellectually stimulating coalition of formerly isolated Christian groups into a largely unified, positive and welcoming institution. On the journey, religious leaders are killed and violated; modern politics is refined to an engineering discipline; and a consortium of Small Industry Nations in Europe and the Middle East become the drivers of the world economy.

To the Twenty-Third Century reader, ideas like excommunication, "God Hates Gays", forbidden books and exclusive Christian cults seem bizarre since the only experience this reader has of Christianity is as a calm and loving intellectual movement. This book reveals to that reader (and to the reader of today) how a massive closed-minded cult could evolve into the welcoming and philosophically rigorous community worthily called the Body of Christ.

Julian S. Taylor