In the spring of 2008, Forrest Church wrote what he believed would be his final work, Love & Death. But when an experimental cancer treatment gave him a temporary new lease on life, Church saw he had a chance to tie up the one loose end in his remarkable oeuvre: his vocation as a liberal theologian.

The Cathedral of the World offers the culmination of a lifetime of thought and lived theology from one who has been called the leading universalist philosopher of his generation. Here Church draws from the entire span of his life’s work to hammer out a clear statement of his universalist theology, gathering his thoughts on religion, faith, and God in a single volume and definitively framing his theological teachings.

After opening with a liberal interpretation of the divine, Church compellingly argues that our country was founded on universalist principles, laying out a firm grounding for his theology. Providing a taste of universalism in action, Church’s faith next becomes the inspiration and support for a lifetime of community activism and social justice. Bringing the arc to an end is a systematic unpacking of Church’s theology—the universalist good news that beats near the heart of almost every faith tradition.

In a society in which religion has been hijacked by the religious right and ridiculed by the secular left, Forrest Church gives new voice to the power of liberal religion, openhearted and open-minded, humble and awestruck. In answer to the divisive global trend toward competing fundamentalisms and the dangerous spread of neighborly hate, Church invites all seekers to enter the Cathedral of the World, where there are many windows but only one light.

Today’s dispute over the line between church and state (or the lack thereof) is neither the first nor the fiercest in our history. In a powerful retelling of the birth of the American body politic, religious historian Forrest Church describes our first great culture war—a tumultuous yet nearly forgotten conflict that raged from George Washington’s presidency to James Monroe’s. On one side of the battle, the proponents of order—Federalists, Congregationalists, New Englanders—believed that the only legitimate ruler of men is God. On the other side, the defenders of liberty—republicans, Baptists, Virginians—cheered the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, and believed that only the separation of church and state would preserve man’s freedom. Would we be a nation under God, or with liberty for all?

In this vigorous history, Forrest Church offers a new vision of our earliest presidents’ beliefs, reshaping assumptions about the debates that still reverberate across our land.

On February 4, 2008, Forrest Church sent a letter to the members of his congregation, informing them that he had terminal cancer but promising to sum up his thoughts on the topics that had been so pervasive in his work—love and death. The goal of life, Church tells us, "is to live in such a way that our lives will prove worth dying for." This moving book is imbued with ideas and exemplars for achieving that goal.