By Ilia Delio. Published by Orbis Books, 2019. Reviewed by Ann Gilroy

Birth of a Dancing Star is the autobiography of Ilia Delio, a USA theologian and author who has been on speaking engagements in this part of the world. The book sets the author in her family, the late child in an Italian-American family. Ilia recounts her life focusing on her breakthroughs into new understandings of herself and reality: family and schooling, university studies in science, entering a Carmelite monastery and leaving, joining a Franciscan community and discovering theology, then leaving that community and beginning a new Franciscan community and a full time university position. The last few chapters I found the most stimulating. Ilia invites the reader to join her in understanding the wholeness of religion and science — of everything — in the energy of the love of God. This brings alive her studies of Bonaventure and Teilhard de Chardin and many people along the way. While some accounts in the early chapters sound contrived and observations about people are frank and even dismissive, in the last part of the book — not easy reading — a great teacher is inviting the reader into a whole new consciousness of cyborg Christianity.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 247 April 2020: 13