Works by
Tom Harpur
(Writer)
[1929 - ]

Children

• Terrible Fin Maccoul (1991)
  Baby-preschool.

• The Mouse That Couldn't Squeak (1988) with Dawn Lee
  Rusty is his name. Not only is he the runt of the litter but also, try as he may, he cannot squeak. And that is why the eager little mouse is forbidden to go with the others on their foraging trips to the big red barn across the fields.
  As winter deepens, he reluctantly stays behind in the mousery trimming the tunnels for Christmas and fetching twigs for the fire. But when fearsome owls prevent the mice from gathering food, Rusty finds a way to use what sets him apart to save the mousery and make Christmas come true for one and all.  Baby-preschool.

Non-fiction

• Water Into Wine: An Empowering Vision of the Gospels (2007)

• Living Waters (2006)
  On the heels of his towering bestseller, The Pagan Christ, comes a timely collection of writing about spirituality by Tom Harpur. This new book highlights fifteen years of Harpurs most popular and insightful columns from the Toronto Star. Organized into five sections, the articles in this collection explore five main themes: how to find meaning in our lives how to develop a more rational, fulfilling and contemporary faith how to discover who we really are amidst the chaos of the modern world how our yearly celebrations originated in ancient times and how to cope, learn and grow from adversity In a time in which many are searching for spiritual meaning, this inspired collection points the way towards a new understanding of how we can be fully human within our changing lives.

• The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light (2004)
  A provocative argument for a mystical, rather than historical, understanding of Jesus, leading to a radical rebirth of Christianity in our time.
  
  For forty years, scholar and religious commentator Tom Harpur has challenged church orthodoxy and guided thousands of readers on subjects as controversial as the true nature of Christ and life after death. Now, in his most radical and groundbreaking work, Harpur digs deep into the origins of Christianity.
  
  Long before the advent of Jesus Christ, the Egyptians and other peoples believed in the coming of a messiah, a virgin birth, a madonna and her child, and the incarnation of the spirit in flesh. While the early Christian church accepted these ancient truths as the very basis of Christianity, it disavowed their origins. What had begun as a universal belief system built on myth and allegory was transformed, by the third and fourth centuries A.D., into a ritualistic institution based on a literal interpretation of myths and symbols. But, as Tom Harpur argues in The Pagan Christ, "to take the Gospels literally as history or biography is to utterly miss their inner spiritual meaning."
  
  At a time of religious extremism, Tom Harpur reveals the virtue of a cosmic faith based on ancient truths that the modern church has renounced. His message is clear: Our blind faith in literalism is killing Christianity. Only with a return to an inclusive religion where Christ lives within each of us will we gain a true understanding of who we are and who we are intended to become. The Pagan Christ is a book of rare insight and power that will reilluminate the Bible and change the way we think about religion.

• Spirituality Of Wine (2004)

• Finding The Still Point- A Spiritual Response to Stress (2002)
  Stress. We all know about it. We all experience it. Every day, scientific evidence showing the debilitating effects of too much stress mounts. The question is: What to do about it?
  
  Tom Harpur shows how ancient wisdoms, combined with exciting new scientific discoveries and mind/body relaxation techniques, can meet the stress crisis. Divorced from their spiritual underpinnings and/or religious understanding, modern techniques lack the potency they originally had. Central to a spiritual response to stress is the practice of spiritual meditation in its various forms. While many within traditional Christianity still view meditation with suspicion, Harpur shows it to be one of the lost jewels of an historic treasury of Christian gifts designed for healing. More than that, it is a revitalizing gift, which the church can reclaim for its own and offer to those outside the church who are seeking identity, meaning, and purpose.
  
  Organized into four sections: "The Contemporary Scene," "The Spiritual Response," "Sources and Mantras," and "The God Within," the book considers medical solutions for stress, meditation methods and approaches from many traditions, and the Christian response.

• Prayer: The Hidden Fire -- A Practical & Personal Approach to Awakening a Greater Intimacy With God (1998)
  For more than 25 years, journalist, author and commentator Tom Harpur has been thinking, speaking, and writing about religion and spirituality for the mass media and a popular audience. In the process, he has traveled the globe, written 14 books and thousands of articles on everything from life after death and the place of healing in religion to the controversy over who Jesus is and the rational basis for a firm belief in God.
  
  In all of this experience, Tom Harpur discovered that one of the central issues for every faith is prayer. Yet, over his time as a parish priest, seminary professor and commentator, Harpur found a distinct gap in the books available on prayer. Simple, practical, and focused on real life, Prayer: The Hidden Fire is the kind of book on prayer Tom Harpur wanted and badly needed many years ago when he first consciously took over his own spiritual journey.
  
  This book examines our deep inner need to pray. Harpur encourages readers to go beyond childhood notions of prayer and to develop a personal style of praying and repertoire of prayers that work for them today. Along the way, Tom Harpur shares experiences from his own spiritual journey, and gives readers his most personal work to date.

• Would You Believe? Finding God Without Losing Your Mind (1996, 2000)
  A hundred years ago, most people accepted without question what their priest or rabbi or imam taught them about God, but many people today, educated to think for themselves, find that the concepts of God taught by the world’s major religions either insult or contradict their intelligence. At the same time they find that having no faith has left a yawning spiritual void in their lives. In Would You Believe?, Tom Harpur deals with the tough questions raised today by real people, such as how to reconcile the presence of evil, pain and suffering with belief in a loving God.
  
  The challenge we face, Harpur writes, is not to find a substitute but to rediscover God under the encrustation of ritual and doctrine that the various faiths have built up. We can go beyond all narrow-minded claims of being the only true religion, the only correct interpreter of God, he says, when we understand that all faiths are simply routes towards God that humans have been inspired to create. We can use our intelligence to believe in God, rather than deny it in order to swallow notions devised for a different people and a different time. 
  
  Released in the US in 1996 as The Thinking Person's Guide to God: Overcoming the Obstacles to Belief

• The Divine Lover: A Celebration of Romantic Love (1994)
  With each of his books, Tom Harpur explores ideas that enlarge the mind and enrich the imagination. A master communicator, he brings clarity and understanding to the deepest issues of life. In this volume of original love poems written for his wife, Susan, his opening perceptive essay presents challenging thoughts: readers should enjoy a celebration of romantic love, the Church should not only emphasize the symbolism in love poetry, such as the Biblical "The Song of Songs," but should affirm the sensual feeling of lovers.

• The Uncommon Touch (1994)
  Long ago – before there were doctors, pharmacists, and hospitals – religion and medicine were one, and physical and spiritual ailments were treated alike. Most world religions practised healing, including the early Christian Church, which followed Jesus Christ’s examples of miraculous healings of the lame and the blind. But, to its cost, the modern Church has largely forgotten its healing role, says Tom Harpur in The Uncommon Touch, a powerful and persuasive investigation of spiritual healing.
  
  Today in the West, medical science and bogus faith-healings have made the idea of spiritual healing almost laughable. Yet the ancient practice of the laying-on of hands is not only still performed, it is now gaining credibility, even among physicians and other sceptics, most notably in Britain.
  
  In The Uncommon Touch, Harpur investigates the religious roots of spiritual healing and looks at the remarkable work and ideas of modern healers. He also describes the many scientific studies that demonstrate clearly the healing and nurturing power of this astonishing phenomenon and verify that something more than the power of suggestion is at work. These include experiments showing increased growth in yeasts that have received the laying-on of hands and documentation of the effectiveness of Therapeutic Touch, a technique used by more than 30,000 nurses in North America.
  
  Using the spirit to help heal the body’s ills is an old idea – one whose time has come again.

• The God Question and Other Faith Issues (1993)
  In The God Question and Other Faith Issues, Tom Harpur vigorously discusses some of the fundamental questions of human existence. The author has generously offered to donate all profits from this book to the Robert Pope Foundation, a non-profit society that nurtures artistic endeavours and provides services to cancer patients.

• God Help Us (1992)
  Every week in his newspaper column on religion and ethics, Tom Harpur pricks the ease of Canadians who are comfortable or complacent in their faiths. No matter our religion or whether we are atheists or agnostics, Harpur challenges us to think about our spiritual well-being and the health of our world.
  
  Harpur’s is a rare and a powerful voice. He writes with the knowledge of a scholar, the flair of a journalist, the concern of a pastor, and the wisdom of someone who has thought deeply about issues with an open, inquiring mind. He is one of a kind in Canada.
  
  God Help Us is a collection of the best of his recent columns. Dealing with topics as vital as the environment, as harrowing as the Gulf War, as timeless as the teachings of Jesus, and as current as the role of women in the Church, Harpur consistently surprises, provokes, and enlightens his readers.

• Life After Death 1991)

• Always on Sunday (1988)

• For Christ's Sake (1987)
  This radical book reveals the real, historical Jesus – and reminds us what he actually said.
  
  Who was Jesus Christ? Was he God in human form? Was he the divine Son of God, conceived by a virgin, who came down to earth to found the one true religion? This is what the Church has been preaching since the Middle Ages, but the Church’s portrait is a far cry from the Jesus Christ described in the New Testament.
  
  For Christ’s Sake is Tom Harpur’s classic study of what the Bible actually tells us about Jesus. Controversial and radical, in that it goes to the roots of what is known, Harpur’s book strips away the mythology about Jesus to reveal a man whose message is still fresh and relevant today.

• Harpur's Heaven and Hell (1983)
  Is there life after death?
  
  This question has puzzled humankind from time immemorial. For thousands of years religions the world over have taught that life does not end at death. Ancient Egyptians used to bury boats with their dead for transport to a new life. Medieval Christendom was rife with graphic, “eye-witness” descriptions of heaven and hell. In the West today, many people claim to have seen or heard from the dead; others have “remembered” past lives while under hypnosis. Still other have experienced “death” and have returned with remarkably similar stories to tell. Yet sceptics, agnostics, and atheists have challenged or rejected the notion of an afterlife, arguing that there is no proof of it whatsoever. Who is right?
  
  In Life After Death, Tom Harpur, religious scholar, journalist, and best-selling author, takes a fresh and wide-ranging look at the question. He searches with an open mind, not for proof, but for evidence, within science, psychology, the Bible, the tenets of world religions, and the extraordinary experiences of ordinary people. And the evidence he meticulously assembles points unfalteringly towards one, logical conclusion: “Death is very much like birth. It is the traumatic but essential passage into a new phase of life.”
  
  Life After Death is an extensively researched and eloquently reasoned investigation, which radiates the author’s intelligence and scholarship. Harpur’s powerful conclusions will challenge believers and sceptics alike. One thing is certain – his message will inspire all readers to reassess the meaning of life.

• The Road to Bethlehem: Two Thousand Years Later (1977)

• Prayer Journal ( )

See also:

• The Best Of Astraea: 17 Articles on Science, History and Philosophy (2006)
  The Best of Astraea is a collection of fascinating articles on science, history and philosophy written by an international group of both best selling authors and private researchers. Many of the contributors are guests of Astraea's free online radio program found at: www.astraeamagazine.com . 
  
  Includes artices by Archie Eschborn, Deepak Bhattacharya, Jaq White, Jim Alison, Jordan B. Peterson Ph.D, Lee McGiffen, Michael Hayes, Peter Marshall, Philip Ball Ph.D, R. Avry Wilson, Robert G. Bauval, Robert Lomas, Steven J. Waller Ph.D, and Tom Harpur.