Abstract
The provocative arguments in this unique book about the centrality of the second coming to Quakerism are challenging to summarize but easy to recommend: this is a work that many Friends could benefit from reading. That it has not been widely read is, I suspect, one of the reasons for its reprinting, two decades after its initial publication. While the insights offered by Ben Pink Dandelion, Douglas Gwyn, and Timothy Peat in Heaven on Earth have appeared elsewhere in separate and better known studies by the same authors, here they come together with a particular force and urgency. The book itself arose out of a 1997 course at Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre taught by these three men, and reading it one can feel a desire to connect and a willingness to take risks often more characteristic of the classroom or seminar than the scholarly text. Heaven on Earth is learned, but it is also deeply personal—as Dandelion writes in the introduction, “the apocalyptic resonances of early Quaker witness continue to disturb and inspire us” (3).
Recommended Citation
Miller, Jay
(2019)
"Book Review: Ben Pink Dandelion, Douglas Gwyn, Timothy Peat. Heaven on Earth: Quakers and the Second Coming. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Philadelphia: Plain Press, 2018.,"
Quaker Religious Thought: Vol. 133, Article 7.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/qrt/vol133/iss1/7