in 1996, bennett wrote the first of five books with 'in search of' in their title, "in search of the sacred: anthropology and the study of religion", in which he called for a combination of historical, textual and participant observation research to shed light on how religion is lived as well as on its history and official dogmas. he argued that no researcher is neutral and that we all need to engage in reflexivity to guard against bias and the imposition of a priori presuppositions, so that, as a reviewer commented, "suddenly the act of observation becomes the subject of observation" and "for a teacher like bennett, his own experience as an ordained minister and missionary, his own experience with the give and take of ecumenical teaching becomes the data of religious thought". "bennett", dening continued, "is not independent of all the observations made through centuries of thought", so "there is convergence: library and field, intellect and emotion, thought and experience in the end come together". the book, said this reviewer, helped "to make the exposition of more than a hundred years of thought on the study of religions lucid and memorable". alan race, in another review, described the book as cutting "through a dense thicket, yielding a clear, highly readable survey of how" anthropology and religious studies "have interacted and failed to interact", although remarking that it mainly discussed european history. bennett followed this in 1998 with "in search of muhammad" and in 2001 with "in search of jesus: insider and outsider images". a. g noorani describes "in search of muhammad" as "an earnest effort by a devout christian to understand muhammad, and places" bennett "in the ranks of others whose services minou reeves acknowledges in her survey of western writing on muhammad." commenting on bennett's discussion of the sources available for the life of muhammad, hugh goddard says that while he is "not as negative" as "some modern western scholars", neither "is he uncritical of them", suggesting that "some traditions, particularly concerning muhammad's miracles and the role of women, should be judged as unreliable." referring to bennett's attempt to suggest how "christ and muhammad might be viewed as somehow complementary, rather than as rivals" he called this a "brave attempt" even though "there are no easy answers to such a significant question." citations include gerard rixhon, who says that he makes "words of bennett's" his "own "when he wrote his searching book on muhammad" and aimed "to hear muslim voices."