The Great Search by John Philip Newell; Worth the Read?

The Great Search by John Philip Newell; Worth the Read?

Reviewed by Gerald Bernstein, March 2025

With the plethora of Spirt (or Soul) and Environmental-themed books of the past decades, does The Great Search provide any new insight or experience back to the reader?   It enters a genre of writing that is already well represented on my bookshelf, including (as example) Love God, Heal Earth (Sally Bingham, editor, 2009), Spiritual Ecology (Leslie Sponsel, 2012), Spiritual Ecology; The Cry of the Earth (Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, editor, 2013), Ecology and Religion (John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, 2014), Rooted and Rising (Margaret Bullitt-Jonas and Leah Schade, editors, 2019) and Sacred Nature (Karen Armstrong, 2022)   Clearly, helping us encounter and expand our deep connection with nature as an manifestation of Creation has become a bit of a cottage industry! 

John Newell’s background is appropriate.  He was an ordained as a minister of the Church of Scotland, but gave this up in 2020 feeling a discontent between foundational creedal statements of Western Christianity and his passion and teaching on the sacredness of the Earth and of each human being; his preference is to focus on the universal wisdom of Jesus for today.  He views himself now as part of a Celtic tradition of lone, “wandering scot” teachers. 

But the question remains, what new perspective can be provided to this theme, and does this perspective illicit a commensurate response in the reader?  

To me, the challenge for an author of an anthology is that of a symphony conductor…. how to let each voice have its own say, while blending the voices to provide a uniform and consistent theme or perspective. The edited books cited above (as examples) provide each guest (or quoted) author the opportunity to articulate their perspective in their own voice- we readers can clearly sense their concerns and passion. But it’s a challenge to find a harmony in the overall work as each voice takes us in a slightly different direction.  

The alternative approach is for the author of the anthology to provide his or her own selection of a cited author’s works; this allows the reader to see how the overall theme is developed across a variety of voices and cited writings.  Yet a potential problem with this approach is to use too little of the cited author’s voice, and to spend too much text explaining the cited author’s perspective and how it fits the overall theme.

In The Great Search, Newell walks the fine line between these two possible failings.  He uses extensive excerpts from his nine cited authors, all of whom have passed away- most wrote during the first half of the 20^th century (Julian of Norwich and Rumi earlier, Thomas Berry later).  He draws heavily from author autobiographies and writings when available, or definitive biographies and writings when autobiographies are lacking.  More than the other works cited above that incorporate author quotations, he allows the cited author’s own voice to be heard.

Newell associates with each cited author a theme or descriptor; a bit of an oversimplifications, but one which helps structure the perspective.  For example, Martin Buber’s writings are said to be “Seeking Presence,” those of Carl Jung “Seeking Awareness” and those of Thomas Berry “Seeking Vision:” an approach which helps highlight a key focus of each author while helping the reader see the similarity and contrasts in each “finger pointing at the moon” and how each author describes that moon. I found most of these associated descriptors accurate and helpful.

Are there shortcomings in The Great Search?  Yes, a few.  Rumi is drunk on love and (from the cited material) shares this love with Jesus; this comes through in passages cited from Rumi’s writings.  Did Newell need to add “Rumi too loves Jesus” among other cross references?  In few other places does Newell add connections between a cited author and Jesus; why for Rumi? This proved a bit of a distraction. Also, Newell includes two Scottish writers—Nan Shepherd and Edwin Muir.  Shepherd’s love for nature and its animating source expressed through her writing of the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland shines through (and caused me to obtain her book “The Living Mountain” from the local library).  Edwin Muir’s expression of faith is well articulated, but any expression of this through nature is muted and not particularly significant in the material quoted—his is perhaps the weakest of the nine expressions of how soul and nature combine.  

So, at the end of the day, the ultimate measure of The Great Search is whether the reader’s resonance with spirit and love of nature is enhanced by reading it, or not.  To this I give a resounding YES!

1. Newell, John Philip; The Great Search, HarperCollins, New York, 2024, page 6

2. https://www.earthandsoul.org/john-philip-newell, downloaded February 23, 2025.

3. Newell, page 118