The Tao of Teaching is written in the same style as the Tao Te Ching, and gives examples from the classrooms of three present-day teachers whom the author feels embody Taoist wisdom and "student-centered" educational methods. The Tao of Teaching is a labor of love, containing many important insights by a talented and respected professional whose emphasis is on the students' contribution in a learning environment, whatever the context.

    Challenge your preceptions of the universe and explore ideas as varied as superspace theater and zero-time ghosts and even explore a future where time travel is real and black holes are gateways rather than endings.

    Louis Post-Dispatch While religion has fueled the often violent conflict plaguing the Holy Land, Yossi Klein Halevi wondered whether it could be a source of unity as well. To find the answer, this religious Israeli Jew began a two-year exploration to discover a common language with his Christian and Muslim neighbors. He followed their holiday cycles, befriended Christian monastics and Islamic mystics, and joined them in prayer in monasteries and mosques in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden traces that remarkable spiritual journey. Halevi candidly reveals how he fought to reconcile his own fears and anger as a Jew to relate to Christians and Muslims as fellow spiritual seekers. He chronicles the difficulty of overcoming multiple obstacles—theological, political, historical, and psychological—that separate believers of the three monotheistic faiths. And he introduces a diverse range of people attempting to reconcile the dichotomous heart of this sacred place—a struggle central to Israel, but which resonates for us all.

    By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people--beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it. Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, remember, and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own 'voices' and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. This is the story of how she made those discoveries and how the plants helped her along the way.

    Astrophysicist Adam Frank traces the question of alien life and intelligence from the ancient Greeks to the leading thinkers of our own time, and shows how we as a civilization can only hope to survive climate change if we recognize what science has recently discovered: that we are just one of ten billion trillion planets in the Universe, and it’s highly likely that many of those planets hosted technologically advanced alien civilizations. What’s more, each of those civilizations must have faced the same challenge of civilization-driven climate change.Written with great clarity and conviction, Light of the Stars builds on the inspiring work of pioneering scientists such as Frank Drake and Carl Sagan, whose work at the dawn of the space age began building the new science of astrobiology; Jack James, the Texas-born engineer who drove NASA’s first planetary missions to success; Vladimir Vernadsky, the Russian geochemist who first envisioned the Earth’s biosphere; and James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who invented Gaia theory. Frank recounts the perilous journey NASA undertook across millions of miles of deep space to get its probes to Venus and Mars, yielding our first view of the cosmic laws of planets and climate that changed our understanding of our place in the universe.Thrilling science at the grandest of scales, Light of the Stars explores what may be the largest question of all: What can the likely presence of life on other worlds tell us about our own fate?

    This historical magnum opus covers 4,000 years of the extraordinary history of the Jews as a people, a culture, and a nation, showing the impact of Jewish character and imagination upon the world.

    Storytelling is a major component of Jewish tradition and this book honors that heritage with stories that celebrate the joys, sorrows and challenges of being Jewish. Some stories are timely and others are timeless, yet all are filled with heart-and, of course, love. Discover the invincible power of love in the pages of this book-love of family, love of tradition, love of God. For Jews and non-Jews alike, this collection is sure to capture hearts.

    Martin Buber devoted forty years of his life to collecting and retelling the legends of Hasidim. Nowhere in the last centuries, wrote Buber in Hasidim and Modern Man, has the soul-force of Judaism so manifested itself as in Hasidim... Without an iota being altered in the law, in the ritual, in the traditional life-norms, the long-accustomed arose in a fresh light and meaning.These marvelous tales--terse, vigorous, often cryptic--are the true texts of Hasidim. The hasidic masters, of whom these tales are told, are full-bodied personalities, yet their lives seem almost symbolic. Through them is expressed the intensity and holy joy whereby God becomes visible in everything.

    What resulted is this book: an honest, intelligent, no-holds-barred discussion of virtually every “hot button” issue on which Reform and Orthodox Jews differ, among them the existence of a Supreme Being, the origins and authenticity of the Bible and the Oral Law, the role of women, assimilation, the value of secular culture, and Israel.Sometimes they agree; more often than not they disagree—and quite sharply, too. But the important thing is that, as they keep talking to each other, they discover that they actually like each other, and, above all, they respect each other. Their journey from mutual suspicion to mutual regard is an extraordinary one; from it, both Jews and non-Jews of all backgrounds can learn a great deal about the practice of Judaism today and about the continuity of the Jewish people into the future.From the Hardcover edition.

    His famous paper, Theology and Falsification, was first presented at a meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club chaired by C. S. Lewis and went on to become the most widely reprinted philosophical publication of the last five decades. Flew earned his fame by arguing that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. He now believes that such evidence exists, and There Is a God chronicles his journey from staunch atheism to believer.For the first time, this book will present a detailed and fascinating account of Flew's riveting decision to revoke his previous beliefs and argue for the existence of God. Ever since Flew's announcement, there has been great debate among atheists and believers alike about what exactly this "conversion" means. There Is a God will finally put this debate to rest.This is a story of a brilliant mind and reasoned thinker, and where his lifelong intellectual pursuit eventually led him: belief in God as designer.

    At best he is viewed as the founder of a new religion which for millennia was hostile to Judaism. At worst he is seen as the source of world's anti-Semitism, with the charge that the Jews were responsible for his death being the impetus for the murder of countless Jews throughout the ages. But the historical Jesus is also foreign to most Christians who are oblivious to the life he lived as a Jew, his real mission in ancient Judea, the source of most of his celebrated teachings, and his firm attachment to his people. Now, in a remarkable new book, the man universally known as 'America's Rabbi' and whom Newsweek Magazine calls 'the most famous Rabbi in America, ' best-selling author Shmuley Boteach offers us a breathtaking new view of Jesus, based on Jewish and Christian sources, that will serve as a bridge between two faith communities too long parted by...

    We go to synagogue dutifully enough. We rise when we should rise, sit when we should sit. We read and sing along with the cantor and answer 'Amen' in all the right places. We may even rattle through the prayers with ease. We sacrifice vitality for shelf-life, and the neshomeh, the Jewish soul, can taste the difference."--from the IntroductionThis fresh approach to prayer is for all who wish to appreciate the power of prayer's poetry and song, jump into its ceremonies and rituals, and join the age-old conversation that Jews have had with God. Reb Zalman, one of the most important Jewish spiritual teachers in contemporary American Judaism, offers you new ways to pray, new channels for communicating with God and new opportunities to open your heart to God's response.With rare warmth and authenticity, Reb Zalman shows you:How prayer can engage not just spirit, but mind, heart and bodyMeditations that open the door to kavanah, the focus or intention with which we prayHow to understand the underlying "deep structure" of our prayer servicesHow to find and feel at home in a synagogueHow to sing and lead niggunim, the simple, wordless tunes that Jews sing to get closer to Godand more

    “Stunning . . . Bari Weiss is heroic, fearless, brilliant and big-hearted. Most importantly, she is right.”—Lisa Taddeo, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Three Women On October 27, 2018, eleven Jews were gunned down as they prayed at their synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. For most Americans, the massacre at Tree of Life, the synagogue where Bari Weiss became a bat mitzvah, came as a total shock. But anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred, commonplace across the Middle East and on the rise for years in Europe. So that terrible morning in Pittsburgh raised a question Americans can no longer avoid: Could it happen here? This book is Weiss’s answer. Like many, Weiss long believed this country could escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism. But now the luckiest Jews in history are beginning to face a three-headed dragon known all too well to Jews of other times and places: the physical fear of violent assault, the moral fear of ideological vilification, and the political fear of resurgent fascism and populism. No longer the exclusive province of the far right, the far left, and assorted religious bigots, anti-Semitism now finds a home in identity politics and the reaction against identity politics, in the renewal of America First isolationism and the rise of one-world socialism, and in the spread of Islamist ideas into unlikely places. A hatred that was, until recently, reliably taboo, anti-Semitism is migrating toward the mainstream, amplified by social media and a culture of conspiracy that threatens us all. Weiss’s cri de couer is an unnerving reminder that Jews must never lose their hard-won instinct for danger, and a powerful case for renewing Jewish and American values in uncertain times from one of our most provocative writers. Not just for the sake of America’s Jews, but for the sake of America.

    

    It included Hebrew, a touch of the Romance and Slavic languages, and a large helping of German. In a world of earthly wandering, this pungent, witty, and infinitely nuanced speech, full of jokes, puns, and ironies, became the linguistic home of the Jews, the bond that held a people together.Here is the remarkable story of how this humble language took vigorous root in Eastern European shtetls and in the Jewish quarters of cities across Europe; how it achieved a rich literary flowering between the wars in Europe and America; how it was rejected by emancipated Jews; and how it fell victim to the Holocaust. And how, in yet another twist of destiny, Yiddish today is becoming the darling of academia. Yiddish is a history as story, a tale of flesh-and-blood people with manic humor, visionary courage, brilliant causes, and glorious flaws. It will delight everyone who cares about language, literature, and culture.