TIME WITHIN MIND

The title under which this book was written--""The Search for God in Time and Memory""--is an apt description of Father Dunne's intentions. By a process which he calls ""passing over"" (arriving at a sympathetic understanding of others and returning to a new understanding of oneself), the author analyzes the manifestations of God in time and human memory. He begins with the simple Gospel narratives and ends with the less edifying stories told of God in the modern era, in between sifting through an enormous mass of relevant literature and tradition, to arrive finally at the true ""face underlying all, that of the compassionate God and the compassionate Savior."" The book combines some very sound thinking with interesting (though necessarily less sound) conjecture, the latter arrived at by the ""passing over"" technique. On the whole, however, it seems an exercise in a rather naive anthropomorphism which renders its value affective rather than intellectual, inspirational rather than objective. The reader will have to be one who is content, after two hundred pages of less-than-glittering prose, to find, at the end, a God cast in his image.