Here, Chögyam Trungpa discusses bardo in a very different sense: as the peak experience of any given moment. Our experience of the present moment is always colored by one of six psychological states: the god realm (bliss), the jealous god realm (jealousy and lust for entertainment), the human realm (passion and desire), the animal realm (ignorance), the hungry ghost realm (poverty and possessiveness), and the hell realm (aggression and hatred). In relating these realms to the six traditional Buddhist bardo experiences, Trungpa provides an insightful look at the "madness" of our familiar psychological patterns and shows how they present an opportunity to transmute daily experience into freedom.

    But biblical evidence and modern brain science show that our character is shaped more by whom we love than what we believe.Through conversations he had with Dallas Willard at the Heart & Soul Conference shortly before Dallas's death, Jim Wilder shows how we can train our brains to relate to God based on joyful, mutual attachment--which leads to emotional and spiritual maturity as our identity and character are formed by our relationship with God.

    Each devotion in Around the Year with Emmet Fox works to remind us that our thoughts shape our reality, and helps us access the strength to overcome sorrows, frustrations, and challenges in our daily lives. The keen insights captured here speak as freshly to the everyday needs of humanity as they did the day Fox first wrote them.

    Every person is constantly seeking redemption (or at least the feeling of it) in his or her life, believing countless gospels that promise to fix the brokenness. Typically their pursuits include the desire for fulfilling relationships, successful careers, satisfying religious systems, status, and escape. Miller reveals how the inability to find redemption leads to chaotic relationships, self-hatred, the accumulation of meaningless material possessions, and a lack of inner peace. Readers will learn to identify in themselves and within others the universal desire for redemption. They will discover that the gospel of Jesus is the only way to find meaning in life and true redemption. Mature believers as well as seekers and new Christians will find themselves identifying with the narrative journey unfolded in the book, which is simply the pursuit of redemption.In Searching for God Knows What, best-selling author Donald Miller invites you to reconnect with a faith worth believing. With humor, intelligence, and his trademark writing style, he shows that relationship is God’s way of leading us to redemption. And our need for redemption drives us to relationship with God. “Being a Christian,” Miller writes, “is more like falling in love than understanding a series of ideas.”Maybe you are a Christian wondering what faith you signed up for. Or maybe you don’t believe anything and are daring someone—anyone—to show you a genuine example of authentic faith. Somewhere beyond the self-help formulas, fancy marketing, and easy promises there is a life-changing experience with God waiting. Searching for God Knows What weaves together beautiful stories and fresh perspectives on the Bible to show one man’s journey to find it.

    Providing instruction in the basic elements of the Toltec spiritual practice, this collection of ceremonies, wisdom, and prophecies empowers readers to shed their fears, judgments, and guilt—an essential step before practicing the Four Agreements.

    For de Caussade, living in the moment meant having a complete trust and faith in God, for God's will defined and guided all things. The practical advice contained in his guidebook for the faithful was originally a series of letters written for the Nuns of the Visitation of Nancy, meant to help them navigate the confusing and difficult work of spiritual enlightenment, and comes together here in two distinct parts, one for the theoretical foundations of abandoning oneself to the present moment and one with practical advice on how to live such a life. Though a departure from the standard Christian perspective, Abandonment to Divine Providence remains a deeply spiritual work with a message that many Christians may find freeing and inspiring.

    He makes the provocative case that to remedy this problem, we should return to teaching religion in the public schools. Alongside "reading, writing, and arithmetic," religion ought to become the "Fourth R" of American education.Many believe that America's descent into religious illiteracy was the doing of activist judges and secularists hell-bent on banishing religion from the public square. Prothero reveals that this is a profound misunderstanding. "In one of the great ironies of American religious history," Prothero writes, "it was the nation's most fervent people of faith who steered us down the road to religious illiteracy. Just how that happened is one of the stories this book has to tell."Prothero avoids the trap of religious relativism by addressing both the core tenets of the world's major religions and the real differences among them. Complete with a dictionary of the key beliefs, characters, and stories of Christianity, Islam, and other religions, Religious Literacy reveals what every American needs to know in order to confront the domestic and foreign challenges facing this country today.

    Covering a wide range of religious communities—including Evangelical, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, Muslim, Calvinist, Moonie, and Jehovah’s Witness—and containing contributions from authors like Julia Scheeres (Jesus Land), the stories in Beyond Belief reveal how these women became involved, what their lives were like, and why they came to the decision to eventually abandon their faiths. The authors shed a bright light on the rigid expectations and misogyny so often built into religious orthodoxy, yet they also explain the lure—why so many women are attracted to these lifestyles, what they find that’s beautiful about living a religious life, and why leaving can be not only very difficult but also bittersweet.

    Ten years after it was first published, this is still the leading resource and reference for all those interested in cross-cultural and current forms of shamanism: now with a new introduction and a list of current shamanic resources.

    Gorgeous and uplifting, Tattoos on the Heart amply demonstrates the impact unconditional love can have on your life. As a pastor working in a neighborhood with the highest concentration of murderous gang activity in Los Angeles, Gregory Boyle created an organization to provide jobs, job training, and encouragement so that young people could work together and learn the mutual respect that comes from collaboration. Tattoos on the Heart is a breathtaking series of parables distilled from his twenty years in the barrio. Arranged by theme and filled with sparkling humor and glowing generosity, these essays offer a stirring look at how full our lives could be if we could find the joy in loving others and in being loved unconditionally. From giant, tattooed Cesar, shopping at JCPenney fresh out of prison, we learn how to feel worthy of God’s love. From ten-year-old Lula we learn the importance of being known and acknowledged. From Pedro we understand the kind of patience necessary to rescue someone from the darkness. In each chapter we benefit from Boyle’s wonderful, hard-earned wisdom. Inspired by faith but applicable to anyone trying to be good, these personal, unflinching stories are full of surprising revelations and observations of the community in which Boyle works and of the many lives he has helped save. Erudite, down-to-earth, and utterly heartening, these essays about universal kinship and redemption are moving examples of the power of unconditional love in difficult times and the importance of fighting despair. With Gregory Boyle’s guidance, we can recognize our own wounds in the broken lives and daunting struggles of the men and women in these parables and learn to find joy in all of the people around us. Tattoos on the Heart reminds us that no life is less valuable than another.

    In our "societies of depression" where individuals confront their own loneliness, this theme has recently regained its intensity.In these dense and luminous pages, he is not content merely to show how much this feeling is profoundly inscribed in the heart and the word of God?from the Psalms to the Gospels?but he enters into intimate dialogue with contemporary thought and in particular its existentialist expression. For Balthasar, the Christian faith does not offer a ready made response, but is simultaneously a journey through the torment of the cross and the liberation from fear by the gift of grace. In the wake of a Bernanos, or a Péguy, Balthasar emphasizes how much confidence in God leads to a hope which is inexhaustible.

    A dynamic table of contents enables to jump directly to the chapter selected. Table of Contents - About This Book - The Duty Of Inquiry - The Weight Of Authority - The Limits Of Inference

    Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those scientists. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander knew that NDEs feel real, but are simply fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress.Then, Dr. Alexander’s own brain was attacked by a rare illness. The part of the brain that controls thought and emotion—and in essence makes us human—shut down completely. For seven days he lay in a coma. Then, as his doctors considered stopping treatment, Alexander’s eyes popped open. He had come back.Alexander’s recovery is a medical miracle. But the real miracle of his story lies elsewhere. While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.Alexander’s story is not a fantasy. Before he underwent his journey, he could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. Today Alexander is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.This story would be remarkable no matter who it happened to. That it happened to Dr. Alexander makes it revolutionary. No scientist or person of faith will be able to ignore it. Reading it will change your life.

    The question of why there is pain and suffering in the world has confounded every generation; yet there has not been a major book from a Christian perspective exploring why they exist for many years. The two classics in this area are When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, which was published more than thirty years ago, and C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain, published more than seventy years ago. The great secular book on the subject, Elisabeth Ku¨bler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, was first published in 1969. It’s time for a new understanding and perspective, and who better to tackle this complex subject than Timothy Keller? As the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, Timothy Keller is known for the unique insights he shares, and his series of books has guided countless readers in their spiritual journeys. Walking with God through Pain and Suffering will bring a much-needed, fresh viewpoint on this important issue.

     When Brian Doyle died of brain cancer at the age of sixty, he left behind dozens of books -- fiction and nonfiction, as well as hundreds of essays -- and a cult-like following who regarded his writing on spirituality as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st century. Though Doyle occasionally wrote about Catholic spirituality, his writing is more broadly about the religion of everyday things. He writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the holiness of small things, and about love in all its forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, friendly love, love of nature, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon. At a time when our world feels darker than ever, Doyle's essays are a balm for the tired soul. He finds beauty in the quotidian: the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, the whiskers a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every day -- but through his eyes, nothing is ordinary. David James Duncan sums up Doyle's sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to the glories hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size or renown, and brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings." In a time when wonder seems to be in short supply, One Long River of Song, Doyle and Duncan invite readers to experience it in the most ordinary of moments, and allow themselves joy in the smallest of things.