John Dunne's books A Search for God in Time and Memory and The Way of All the Earth describe and employ a method which their author calls “passing over and coming back,” in order to attain and lead his readers into a sympathetic understanding, first of other lives and second of other religions. These and Dunne's other books are generally taken to be among the major theological works of recent years, but teachers of theology have tended to find them forbidding as texts for undergraduates. In this paper I wish to discuss some techniques which I have employed to assist undergraduates not only to read Dunne's books but to engage personally in the process of passing over and coming back. I wish to go further than that, though. It seems to me that the techniques I am presenting are applicable to other texts besides Dunne's, and I want to stress that broader application. It also seems to me that there are some real problems, especially moral problems, in engaging in “passing over and coming back” in a classroom setting, and I want to set out something of what those problems are, to discuss the extent to which I cope or fail to cope with them, and to invite readers' reflections on how better to cope with them. Because I am offering reflections on my own experience (including unsolved problems) as a teacher and not trying to put forward a general theory of any kind, I am keeping this paper in the first person singular throughout.