Book picks similar to
Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality by Darrel Ray
non-fiction
religion
sexuality
psychology
The Sacred Enneagram: Finding Your Unique Path to Spiritual Growth
Christopher L. Heuertz - 2017
Far more than a personality test, author Chris Heuertz writes, the enneagram is a sacred map to the soul. Lies about who we think we are keep us trapped in loops of self-defeat. But the enneagram offers a bright path to cutting through the internal clutter and finding our way back to God and to our true identity as God created us.Chris Heuertz’ life was forever changed after he learned about the enneagram 15 years ago. Today, he leads enneagram workshops all over the world. Join Chris as he shows you how this ancient tool can help you awaken to the gifts God has given you, find freedom from your personal patterns of sin and fear, and grow in acceptance of your identity as you grow with God.In conversational style with compelling stories, The Sacred Enneagram will show youHow to understand the 'why' behind your type, beyond caricatures and stereotypesHow to align your type with prayer posturesHow to identify and find freedom from self-destructive patternsHow to grow in spiritual discernmentHow to face your past wounds and step toward healingHow to awaken your unique gifts to serve today’s broken worldChris’s own journey with the enneagram is an accessible introduction and exploration of how the enneagram can change your life, because to the extent that we are transformed, the world will be transformed.
The Reality Revolution: The Mind-Blowing Movement to Hack Your Reality
Brian Scott - 2020
More and more people are discovering the power of their minds to shape the world around them faster than ever before. The question is: how do you create the reality of your design?Brian Scott wants to help you find the answer. After walking away unscathed from a near-fatal shooting in his home, Brian began a fanatical search for answers. He deepened his research into parallel realities, quantum mechanics, and consciousness to uncover what happened in his close call with death. Along the way, he developed a series of techniques capable of creating profound transformations.In The Reality Revolution: The Mind-Blowing Movement to Hack Your Reality, Brian introduces you to the techniques that have helped his clients find lasting love, create wealth, and revitalize health. You'll learn how to surf through parallel realities and unlock the power of your mind through a mix of researched and science-backed techniques like qi gong, meditation, quantum jumping, energy work, and reality transurfing. If you're ready to create an incredible reality for yourself, this book shows you the way.
The Golden Bough
James George Frazer - 1890
The Golden Bough" describes our ancestors' primitive methods of worship, sex practices, strange rituals and festivals. Disproving the popular thought that primitive life was simple, this monumental survey shows that savage man was enmeshed in a tangle of magic, taboos, and superstitions. Revealed here is the evolution of man from savagery to civilization, from the modification of his weird and often bloodthirsty customs to the entry of lasting moral, ethical, and spiritual values.
The Wonderbox: Curious Histories of How to Live
Roman Krznaric - 2011
But we rarely to look to history for inspiration--and when we do, it can be surprisingly powerful.Showing the lessons that can be learned from the past, cultural historian Roman Krznaric explores twelve universal topics, from work and love to money and creativity, and reveals the wisdom that we've been missing. There is much to be learned from Ancient Greece on relationships, from the industrial revolution on job satisfaction, and from Ming-dynasty China on bringing up our children.Just as a Renaissance "Wunderkammer" was a curiosity cabinet full of fascinating objects, each with a story behind it, The Wonderbox is full of stories and ideas from history, each of which sheds invaluable light on the decisions we make every day, whether we think about the different uses of the senses or changing attitudes to time.History is usually read for pleasure or for insight into current affairs, but The Wonderbox, stepping into the territory of Alain de Botton and Theodore Zeldin, is "practical history"--using the past to think about our day-to-day lives.
Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World
Shereen El Feki - 2013
The result is an informative, insightful, and engaging account of a highly sensitive and still largely secret aspect of Arab society. Sex is entwined in religion, tradition, politics, economics, and culture, so it is the perfect lens through which to examine the complex social landscape of the Arab world. From pregnant virgins to desperate housewives, from fearless activists to religious firebrands, from sex work to same-sex relations, Sex and the Citadel takes a fresh look at the sexual history of the region and brings new voices to the debate over its future. This is no peep show or academic treatise but a highly personal and often humorous account of one woman’s journey to better understand Arab society at its most intimate and, in the process, to better understand her own origins. Rich with five years of groundbreaking research, Sex and the Citadel gives us a unique and timely understanding of everyday lives in a part of the world that is changing before our eyes.
Everybody, Always: Becoming Love in a World Full of Setbacks and Difficult People
Bob Goff - 2018
The path toward the liberated existence we all long for is found in a truth as simple to say as it is hard to do: love people, even the difficult ones, without distinction and without limits.Driven by Bob’s trademark storytelling, Everybody, Always reveals the lessons Bob learned--often the hard way--about what it means to love without inhibition, insecurity, or restriction. From finding the right friends to discovering the upside of failure, Everybody, Always points the way to embodying love by doing the unexpected, the intimidating, the seemingly impossible. Whether losing his shoes while skydiving solo or befriending a Ugandan witch doctor, Bob steps into life with a no-limits embrace of others that is as infectious as it is extraordinarily ordinary. Everybody, Always reveals how we can do the same.
The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
André Comte-Sponville - 2006
In this inspiring book, bestselling author and philosopher André Comte-Sponville offers a new perspective on the question of God's existence, acknowledging the good that has come of religion while advocating tolerance from both believers and non-believers. Through clear, concise, and often humorous prose, Comte-Sponville offers a convincing appeal for a new form of spiritual life-one that at its heart celebrates the human need to connect to one another and the universe.
The Immortality Key: Uncovering the Secret History of the Religion with No Name
Brian C. Muraresku - 2020
In the tradition of unsolved historical mysteries like David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon and Douglas Preston's The Lost City of the Monkey God, Brian Muraresku’s 10-year investigation takes the reader through Greece, Germany, Spain, France and Italy, offering unprecedented access to the hidden archives of the Louvre and the Vatican along the way.In The Immortality Key, Muraresku explores a little-known connection between the best-kept secret in Ancient Greece and Christianity. This is the real story of the most famous human being who ever lived (Jesus) and the biggest religion the world has ever known. Today, 2.4 billion people are Christian. That's one third of the planet. But do any of them really know how it all started?Before Jerusalem, before Rome, before Mecca—there was Eleusis: the spiritual capital of the ancient world. It promised immortality to Plato and the rest of Athens's greatest minds with a very simple formula: drink this potion, see God. Shrouded in secrecy for millennia, the Ancient Greek sacrament was buried when the newly Christianized Roman Empire obliterated Eleusis in the fourth century AD.Renegade scholars in the 1970s claimed the Greek potion was psychedelic, just like the original Christian Eucharist that replaced it. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. The rapidly growing field of archaeological chemistry has proven the ancient use of visionary drugs. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psycho-pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers. No one has ever found hard, scientific evidence of drugs connected to Eleusis, let alone early Christianity. Until now.Armed with key documents never before translated into English, convincing analysis, and a captivating spirit of quest, Muraresku mines science, classical literature, biblical scholarship and art to deliver the hidden key to eternal life, bringing us to what clinical psychologist William Richards calls "the edge of an awesomely vast frontier."Featuring a Foreword by Graham Hancock, the New York Times bestselling author of America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization.
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Daniel H. Pink - 2009
That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose-and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.
Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality
Nancy R. Pearcey - 2018
A two-time winner of the ECPA Gold Medallion Award, Pearcey has been hailed by The Economist as "America's preeminent evangelical Protestant female intellectual." In Love Thy Body she offers a respectful but riveting exposE of the secular worldview that lies behind trendy slogans and political talking points. A former agnostic, Pearcey is a sensitive guide to the secular ideas that shape current debates. She empowers readers to intelligently and compassionately engage today's most controversial moral and social challenges.In a surprise shattering of stereotypes, Pearcey demonstrates that while secularism promises much, in reality it delivers little. She turns the tables on stereotypes that portray Christianity as harsh and bigoted, and invites a fresh look at its holistic, life-affirming principles: it is a worldview that matches the real world and fits with human experience.All along, Pearcey keeps readers entranced with gripping stories of real people wrestling with hard questions in their own lives--sharing their pain, their struggles, and their triumphs.
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Bobby Henderson - 2006
According to church founder Bobby Henderson, the universe and all life within it were created by a mystical and divine being: the Flying Spaghetti Monster. What drives the FSM's devout followers, a.k.a. Pastafarians? Some say it's the assuring touch from the FSM's "noodly appendage." Then there are those who love the worship service, which is conducted in pirate talk and attended by congregants in dashing buccaneer garb. Still others are drawn to the Church's flimsy moral standards, religious holidays every Friday, or the fact that Pastafarian heaven is way cooler: Does your heaven have a Stripper Factory and a Beer Volcano? Intelligent Design has finally met its match—and it has nothing to do with apes or the Olive Garden of Eden.Within these pages, Bobby Henderson outlines the true facts—dispelling such malicious myths as evolution ("only a theory"), science ("only a lot of theories"), and whether we're really descended from apes (fact: Humans share 95 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees, but they share 99.9 percent with pirates!)See what impressively credentialed top scientists have to say:"If Intelligent Design is taught in schools, equal time should be given to the FSM theory and the non-FSM theory."—Professor Douglas Shaw, Ph.D."Do not be hypocritical. Allow equal time for other alternative 'theories' like FSMism, which is by far the tastier choice."—J. Simon, Ph.D."In my scientific opinion, when comparing the two theories, FSM theory seems to be more valid than classic ID theory."—Afshin Beheshti, Ph.D.
Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions
Johann Hari - 2018
He was told—like his entire generation—that his problem was caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. As an adult, trained in the social sciences, he began to investigate this question—and he learned that almost everything we have been told about depression and anxiety is wrong. Across the world, Hari discovered social scientists who were uncovering the real causes—and they are mostly not in our brains, but in the way we live today. Hari’s journey took him from the people living in the tunnels beneath Las Vegas, to an Amish community in Indiana, to an uprising in Berlin—all showing in vivid and dramatic detail these new insights. They lead to solutions radically different from the ones we have been offered up until now.Just as Chasing the Scream transformed the global debate about addiction, with over twenty million views for his TED talk and the animation based on it, Lost Connections will lead us to a very different debate about depression and anxiety—one that shows how, together, we can end this epidemic.
The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery
Ian Morgan Cron - 2016
Do you want help figuring out who you are and why you're stuck in the same ruts? The Enneagram is an ancient personality typing system with an uncanny accuracy in describing how human beings are wired, both positively and negatively. In The Road Back to You Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile forge a unique approach―a practical, comprehensive way of accessing Enneagram wisdom and exploring its connections with Christian spirituality for a deeper knowledge of ourselves, compassion for others, and love for God. Witty and filled with stories, this book allows you to peek inside each of the nine Enneagram types, keeping you turning the pages long after you have read the chapter about your own number. Not only will you learn more about yourself, but you will also start to see the world through other people's eyes, understanding how and why people think, feel, and act the way they do. Beginning with changes you can start making today, the wisdom of the Enneagram can help take you further along into who you really are―leading you into places of spiritual discovery you would never have found on your own, and paving the way to the wiser, more compassionate person you want to become.
Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships
Tristan Taormino - 2007
Drawing on in-depth interviews with over a hundred women and men, Opening Up explores the real-life benefits and challenges of all styles of open relationships -- from partnered non-monogamy to solo polyamory. With her refreshingly down-to-earth style and sharp wit, Taormino offers solutions for making an open relationship work, including tips on dealing with jealousy, negotiating boundaries, finding community, parenting and time management. Opening Up will change the way you think about intimacy.
Reclaim Your Heart: Personal Insights on Breaking Free from Life's Shackles
Yasmin Mogahed - 2012
Often, we have no idea why this happens. Reclam Your Heart is about freeing the heart from this slavery. It is about the journey in and out of life's most deceptive traps.