Here's what people are saying about The Flying Crossbeam.

Michael Alexander Sirr
M.D.

This book needs editing. 3 Typos I found--see if you were paying attention and found more. Interesting,and self centered book. Religious science fiction with scenes included for future film version? I couldn't help wondering if the author is hard to live with. [note to Julian--you might be a great guy!] My brother, Patrick Sirr, gave me the book.

Jane Wodening
Author

Dotted here and there amongst the human population one can find massive minds and the question in each case is - what concepts will this one take into its teeth and transform into what?

Julian Taylor commences with his philosophical kick-off - "that God is not a distant old man; that the Universe is mystical but not magical, and that rules lead to error and forbid understanding." For perspective's sake, he dates his introduction at 2226 and presents a philosophical pathway into the future wherein a dynamic intelligentsia blossoms in the Catholic philosophy and develops a bloodless and very exciting religious revolution. He does this by taking Christianity, most centrally Catholicism, injecting it naturally with Sufism, The Tao, Zen Buddhism and other philosophies world-wide, not excluding Socratic dialog or Hip-Hop. He then environs it in the probable progression beyond the modern world, techno-physics and the mega-business result of hi-tech marketing.

The man has an amazing humor that is never far from even the most agonized or deeply philosophical thought. Jane Austen is said to have had a rule in her writing that if a sentence isn't amusing, it isn't being given its fullest possibilities. Julian Taylor has a multi-faceted humor that brings logic into sparkling life. It is as though the Dancing Wu-Li Masters had gone into religious philosophy and applied their minds to Catholicism.

At the top of a chapter he has a character say, "I have graduated at roughly ten year intervals from adolescence to idiocy to stupidity to mere ignorance. If I can achieve and maintain near harmlessness, I will die with a feeling of true accomplishment." Julian Taylor is serious about the divinity of each and every thing, most particularly of the Here and Now. He has foregone the easy route of bitterness and presents Divinity as a necessary perspective to discovering truth.

Julian Taylor writes of a character who was writing the first book of Sica, who "wept openly as he typed and questioned if this was a book revealing a profound understanding or just ... therapy." There is no doubt this book is therapeutic for a thinking Catholic - but I would suspect that there are many thinking Catholics and finding religious thought to be good for the emotional balance is not new. In fact, I could imagine Sica drawing fine minds together from around the world.

"Sica" is from the Latin for "Thus," or "As" and was given as name to the field of thought by a journalist who realized that to name it after that first character would give it too much solidity, and what thought needs really is wings.

The revelations come thick and fast in this most amazing book, a delight for the mind. His characters are more than believable, they're sympathetically rendered. The man understands women. He dares to present women as brilliantly feminine. And why not. It gives me hope for the future of women.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in daring to actually think about their belief system, about religion as a living organism, about a vibrant future for religious thought.