The riddle is sometimes asked among religious professionals: "What is the difference between a pizza and a theologian?" The answer: "A pizza can feed a family of four." Those of us who feast on theological fare are accustomed to a peculiar diet. The initiated scholar dines on a pudding of abstractions, sprinkled with hard-shelled semantic nuts, and then marvels that something so ethereal can taste so dense and can deliver such severe heartburn. Normal people are apt to wonder how anyone in his right mind can develop a taste for this kind of material. Serious theology and philosophy seems to contain little of nutritional value for busy people with real jobs and steady incomes.

Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, has dished up a sampler of theological treats and in the process may help a larger public discover a neglected appetite for theology. His recent book, God: A Guide for the Perplexed, begins with an inquiry into the poetic imagination, and he wanders through Homer's world to retrieve those primal impulses that gave narrative form to the gods. Ward draws the reader into these distant worlds in order to break the spell of confining "the real" to what is "literal, countable, and weigh-able." In other words, he demonstrates that the reduction of "truth" to what can be scientifically "measured and verified" obscures entire fields of human experience, indeed those domains of life wherein beauty and meaning are most often encountered.

Many modern people who inhabit a largely secular world do not worry late into the night about the existence of God. Indeed, many seem to get along nicely without relying on such a shaky hypothesis. Ward does not unleash a torrent of defensive arguments to counter the encroachments of secularism or to shatter the complacency of the indifferent. Rather he intro-duces his readers to a remarkable cast of theologians and philosophers all of whom have struggled with the questions: What is the nature of God, and how do the varied under-standings/imaginings of God shape the words, deeds, and actions of humankind? Ward explores the quandaries of suffer-ing and evil from varied philosophical vantage points, and he surveys problems that arise from the collision of faith and science.

I suspect that most readers will not shut this book having put to bed a dizzying array of questions. They will however find that their own lives are greatly enriched and profoundly chal-lenged by the likes of William Blake, Friedrich Schlier-macher, Martin Buber, Thomas Aquinas, and A. N. Whitehead. If there are frustrations, they stem from the inescapable limits of a brief book that bounds over thousands of years and leaps from Christian to Jewish to Eastern cultures to deliver a kaleido-scopic series of flashing observations. Having made the acquaintance of so many notables, the reader may desire a more sustained conversation. The trouble is that it will be extremely difficult to find interpreters and translators who can handle these materials and, against all odds, cook up some-thing as nourishing or delectable.