The Oeuvre of Donald Gelpi, SJ - where to begin?

I recommend his Maximian Christology

Where to start in one’s engagement of Donald Gelpi, SJ, may depend on one’s own particular focus.

1) What Gelpi was about pastorally was a practical theology of conversion, whether the context was RCIA, Renew groups or Charismatic Renewal.

Among his first books, see –

The Conversion Experience: A Reflective Process for RCIA Participants and Others

Committed Worship: A Sacramental Theology for Converting Christians : Volume 1, Adult Conversion and Initiation

Committed Worship: A Sacramental Theology for Converting Christians : Volume 2, The Sacraments of Ongoing Conversion

Charism and sacrament: A theology of Christian conversion

Experiencing God: A Theology of Human Emergence

2) Gelpi’s communication tool was an inculturated theology, which used a Yankee idiom.

See - Inculturating North American Theology: An Experiment in Foundational Method

Also - Varieties of Transcendental Experience: A Study in Constructive Postmodernism

3) Gelpi's foundational approach involved a "turn to experience," generally picking up on the constructive postmodern projects of Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead & Hartshorne.

See - The Turn to Experience in Contemporary Theology

4) Gelpi's foundational philosophical theology was based, in part, upon a concept of conversion as derived from Lonergan. Gelpi's work also endorsed certain aspects of Lonergan's theory of theological method and grounded Lonergan's functional specialties in Peirce's "turn to community."

See - Peirce and Theology: Essays in the Authentication of Doctrine

Also - The Gracing of Human Experience: Rethinking the Relationship Between Nature and Grace

5) More particularly, Gelpi saw himself advancing the project of our fellow Louisianian, Walker Percy, the great Catholic novelist, who had aspired to construct a systematic defense of Christianity using a Peircean realism as his foundation. (Percy was apparently unaware of Josiah Royce's _The Problem of Christianity_, which had attempted same.)

Gelpi's project culminated in his "experiential Christology" as set forth in his three volume _The Firstborn of Many_.

See - Volume 1_To Hope in Jesus Christ; Volume; 2_Synoptic Narrative Christology & Volume 3_Doctrinal and Practical Christology

6) The most exciting aspect of that project to me was how Gelpi employed Peirce to make the Christological insights of Maximus, especially perichoresis & volitional synergy, more philosophically thinkable (many yet struggle with their intelligibility when using substance approaches?).

Gelpi believed, and I agree, that Maximus’s doctrine holds the key to explaining the hypostatic union doctrinally. In my view, using Gelpi's realistic, social, triadic metaphysics of experience, one can best interpret the Christology of Maximus the Confessor.

It's through just such a lens that many might most profitably evaluate the ongoing interpretation of Maximus by Jordan Daniel Wood.

I’ve preliminarily mapped certain Gelpian & Maximian concepts here.