This interview features Bruce Sanguin, a minister in the United Church of Canada and a leading voice in the emerging field of evolutionary spirituality. Inspired by many of the most progressive Christian figures of the twentieth century, including Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Father Thomas Berry, his goal is to bring a fresh, cutting-edge perspective to the contemporary church—one based on a new cosmological understanding of the universe and our central place in it.

The author of The Emerging Church: A Model for Change and a Map for Renewal, Sanguin speaks to Elizabeth Debold about his unique approach to evolutionary Christianity and shares the profound spiritual experience that led him to it. After initially entering the Christian faith as a young man, Sanguin spent many years confused about how to relate the strong personal connection that he had developed with “Christ as a living being” to his more modern understanding of the world, which had no room for the mythical interpretations that accompanied his initial experience of salvation. In search of answers, he underwent an intensive silent retreat and found what he was looking for—an awakening to what many mystics before him have called “cosmic consciousness” in which he experienced himself as “the consciousness of the Universe reflecting on itself.” Since that time he has been one-pointed in his efforts to inform his Christian faith with this new perspective, drawing particularly from the work of many leaders in the world of integral philosophy and spirituality, including Ken Wilber and Don Beck.

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