In the introduction to Rise Up - With Wings Like Eagles, author Chris Sunderland says the following:

"Science came easily to me. The adventure of looking down a microscope each day and seeing things that no one had ever seen before was intoxicating. But it was such a small world. There were a few of us in my very specialized field and we would meet every six months or so at conferences, compare notes and go back to work. I was longing for something more. There was also a tension within me that needed resolving. I had become a Christian at university and was trying to work out the implications of that. The certainties of the scientific approach to truth that I had been brought up with were all that I really understood at this time and I initially tried to translate my scientific approach into a similar certainty in the faith realm. This made me prey to fundamentalists and extremists of various sorts and my wife and I joined, or nearly joined, some catastrophic communities! This experience prompted a deep questioning that has lived with me through the rest of my life and has matured to the sort of position you will see reflected in this book. I am now committed both to the importance of the scientific method in researching truth relating to the material world, and also to the importance of other means of seeking truth in relation to human society and its working. Readers will notice this particularly in Chapter Three, where I set out a bold position about two types of truth, scientific truth and narrative-based truth. I have come to see that human beings use narrative continually in public conversations that seek truth in the social sphere and that narratives bundle up and express the enormously complex world of our deepest commitments, values and feelings so as to provide a clear basis for human action. I have held this view for more than ten years now, so it has stood the test of time, at least in my mind, and I am frustrated that other thinkers and the general public are so unclear are about these things. This is illustrated in Chapter Five by reference to public arguments about climate change."

"This book is written for those who want to achieve social change. Some are existing activists, who I hope will find encouragement, confidence and clear ways of thinking that will undergird their search for a different kind of human society. Some are waiting in the wings of the theatre of change, aware that something new is coming to the world, but not clear what they can do to help bring it to birth. Sometimes they feel overwhelmed, sometimes guilty. They long to do something, but cannot quite see what or how. I hope these people will find here something like a manual for social change that will help them get stuck in with all the passion and energy that is beating within. The book begins with a restatement of some human capacities and how our present culture has fixed on certain human abilities, but has ignored or denigrated others. Building on the magisterial work by Ian McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: the divided brain and the making of the Western world, it suggests that what we call ‘Western’ society is now seriously lacking in several areas, including our capacity to communicate in non-verbal ways, our ability to create cohesive communities, our ability to imagine the feelings of others , our recognition of the commitments that predetermine our decisions and our ability to perceive life as a whole, including the interconnectedness of all things. I draw on the extensive work of Frans de Waal on primate and other animal societies to remind us of some of these capacities and suggest that non-verbal communication is a route to a renewed sense of the‘spiritual’ as we have come to understand it. It becomes clear that the human species is nothing like as rational as it pretends to be. We have to approach the world using pre-formed commitments in order to deal with the complexity of life and we treat these commitments with a profound defensiveness. We hate to change them."

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