After tracing the origin of the religious life and its emergence in the cultural unfolding of humanity, Father van Kaam focuses on the central meaning of the participative religious life to worship and to witness for the transcendent dimension of the culture. Underlying and inspiring each of these considerations is the author's own belief that "to be a religious is to live in a unique and personal way my presence in the world to the Holy, who is the hidden source of true unfolding in the cosmos."

It is obvious, even on first reading, that the second part of the book is as original and creative as the first. Here new concepts about life in the religious community are presented for the first time. It is a com munity, as he says, of sinners, not of saints, and flowery metaphors comparing it to a family of brothers and sisters, an army of soldiers or a heavenly Jerusalem will have to be exposed as inadequate.

The author is at his finest as an observer of human nature and an interpreter of life in the sections on community and structure and com munity and encounter. Especially in the latter, he develops an entire personality theory by breaking the phenomena of encounter into its essential aspects: the en and counter experience, the personal and pre personal, the formal and informal dimensions of a phenomenon much more complicated and refined than we have been led to believe