The work of practical theologian James E. Loder, Jr. (1931-2001) deserves a wider audience. For more than forty years, he developed and exercised an interdisciplinary methodology that identified patterns of correlation in the fields of psychology, educational theory, phenomenology, epistemology, and physics, producing a compelling theological vision that centers on the person and work of the Holy Spirit engaging and transforming human life. At his untimely death in November 2001, Loder was the Mary D. Synnott Professor of Philosophy of Christian Education at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he lectured primarily in the areas of human development and the philosophy of education. This book introduces and examines, explores and untangles the complexity of Loder's thought in order to make it more accessible to a broader audience. At the core of Loder's work is a relational phenomenological pneumatology of inestimable value to the theologian engaged in the ongoing renewal of the church. The Christian life is preeminently relational, distinguished by a relationship with God constituted by Jesus Christ, and sustained by the Holy Spirit. Relationality, Loder claims, takes place in and through the life of the Holy Spirit who operates within a complementary relationship with the human spirit, through an analogia spiritus: a profound, transformational interrelation of the Holy Spirit and the human spirit. The Holy Spirit, intimately connected to the person and work of Christ, takes up and extends the work begun in the incarnation by enfleshing the presence of Christ, thus transforming human life. Loder is distinctive for articulating a pneumatology that incorporates 'how' the self participates in the relationship and the way the self, through the relationship, comes to have a full knowledge of itself, the world, and God. It is precisely the logic of this Christomorphic dynamic that has extraordinary implications for the way we attempt to fathom the depths and convey the meaning of Christian experience. Loder's relational phenomenological pneumatology contains rich and principally unrecognized resources for providing new frameworks for the Christian life.

In March 2012 a small consultation convened on the campus of Princeton Theological Seminary, where James E. Loder Jr. had served for forty years as the Mary D. Synnott Professor of the Philosophy of Christian Education. Members from the Child Theology Movement had begun to read Loder's work and they wanted to go further. So they invited former students of Loder's to meet with them for conversations about things that really mattered to them and to Loder: human beings (and especially children), the church's witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and discerning the work of Spiritus Creator in the postmodern world. The conversations proved rich and rewarding and some would even say they took on a life of their own - serious scholarship set to the music of the Spirit's communion-creating artistry forming new relationships, inspiring new ideas, and sustaining all of it amid much laughter, joy, and hope. These essays, taken from the papers delivered at the consultation, are offered as a means of extending that conversation inspired by Loder's interdisciplinary practical theological science and his discernment of the

The cultural fragmentation spawned by the destructive dualisms of our age has heightened the urgency of the search for common ground in theological and scientific inquiry. In "The Knight's Move,"theologian James E. Loder (at Princeton Seminary) and physicist W. Jim Neidhardt (at the New Jersey Institute of Technology) propose a unifying connection in a generic concept of spirit -- graphically represented by the "strange loop" relationality of the Mobius band. This relational logic is disclosed in surprisingly analogous ways in the "knight's move" of discovery in both science and theology, whether in the leap of insight or in the leap of faith. At the irreducible core of the knight's move is the self-involvement of the knower, pointing to the proximate relationality of the human spirit, to the contingent relationality of physical reality, and ultimately to the trinitarian relationality of God's Spirit. In the pivotal knight's moves of Niels Bohr's complementarity in the exploration of quantum physics and Soren Kierkegaard's qualitative dialectic in the exploration of human nature and the relational logic of the incarnation, the authors establish a model of spirit that illuminates remarkable interdisciplinary convergences in human development (Piaget), scientific discovery (Einstein), and theological knowledge (T.F. Torrance). This relational model also describes the fundamental pattern governing the transformational dynamics of human experience, from the individual journey of intensification to the corporate life of communal interaction. The central insights of "The Knight's Move" are grounded in the relation of human spirit and Divine Spirit, a gracious personal interplay pictured in the unending paradoxical unity of the strange loop. This foundation for the self-relational nature of human knowing provides a fruitful way of conceptualizing common roots in theology and science as revealed in the astonishing developments of the twentieth century.

A growing number of Christians feel drawn to relational theology. The God of the Bible seems thoroughly relational, and we are increasingly aware of our own interrelatedness with others. Contributors to this volume tease out some implications of relational theology in light of a host of issues, doctrines, and agendas. The result is a must-read collection of essays with proposals sure to be the center of conversations for decades to come!

In November 2001, James E. Loder Jr., Professor of the Philosophy of Christian Education for forty years at Princeton Theological Seminary, suddenly died. He was a creative and profound thinker who had just completed a promising book. In it he developed a compelling interdisciplinary model to disclose how the divine Spirit affirms, reconstitutes, and transforms the human spirit to bring new energy and creativity into human experience. He called it redemptive transformation. You now hold that book in your hands. Those who know Loder's work are confident that Educational Ministry in the Logic of the Spirit, though delayed for over fifteen years, will still become the best introduction to his complex thought. More important, it offers the imaginative means by which we may learn to attune ourselves and our faith communities to what God is doing in our fractured, distracted, and self-destructive world to bring about a revolution of love--the fruit of Christ's Spirit and the center of our human vocation. ""In each of his long-awaited lectures on Christian education, Loder's vital and complex theology challenges approaches to education that can destroy the redemptive powers of the human spirit. The reader is shown how ministry in the 'logic of the Spirit' can restore these redemptive powers to the center of educational process in what is nothing short of a dramatic paradigm-shift in educational theory, vocation, and practice."" --John S. McClure, Vanderbilt Divinity School ""Here we see the mature vision of Loder's pneumatological and trinitarian theology of human redemption and transformation . . . read in an educational key. Loder's witness to the Spirit that leads to all truth thus finds amplification through Wright's efforts and will be of interest to all those who not only believe that Christian education ought to make a difference, but also want to know more about how that difference happens."" --Amos Yong, Fuller Seminary James E. Loder Jr. (1931-2001) was the Mary Synnott Professor of the Philosophy of Christian Education at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1962 until 2001. He authored The Transforming Moment (1981/1989), The Knight's Move (with Jim Neidhardt, 1992), and The Logic of the Spirit (1998). Dana R. Wright is the Director of Christian Formation and Discipleship at the First Presbyterian Church in Everett, Washington. He coedited two earlier books influenced by Loder's thought: Redemptive Transformation in Practical Theology (2004) and The Logic of the Spirit in Human Thought and Experience (Pickwick Publications, 2014).

Knowing is less about information and more about transformation; less about comprehension and more about being apprehended. This radical book develops the notion of covenant epistemology--an innovative, biblically compatible, holistic, embodied, life-shaping epistemological vision in which all knowing takes the shape of interpersonal, covenantal relationship. Rather than knowing in order to love, we love in order to know. Meek argues that all knowing is best understood as transformative encounter. Creatively blending insights from a diverse range of conversation partners--including Michael Polanyi, Michael D. Williams, Lesslie Newbigin, Parker Palmer, John Macmurray, Martin Buber, and James Loder--Meek offers critically needed "epistemological therapy" in response to the pervasive and damaging presumptions that those in Western culture continue to bring to efforts to know. The book's innovative approach--an unfolding journey of discovery-through-dialogue--itself subverts standard epistemological presumptions of timeless linearity. While it offers a sustained and sophisticated philosophical argument, Loving to Know's texts and textures interweave loosely to effect therapeutic epistemic transformation in the reader.