Organised religions and rituals are mushrooming and so are adherents and devotees.The message in most religions is "love" and yet there is great violence created in by the supremacy between religions themselves. Each attempting to compete for its proliferation at the expense of the virtues of love they preach. Despite this mutual love seems to be disappearing and violence in society common.Those who are in the profession of teaching spirituality are often limited in themsel...

A short self help book with a Christian slant. Chapters include: Who Is Your Imagination?; Sealed Instructions; Highways Of The Inner World; The Pruning Shears Of Revision; The Coin Of Heaven; It Is Within; Creation Is Finished; The Apple Of God's Eye; and, The Search.

“This book could well be the most highly readable, accurate, and up-to-date introduction to the world’s major religions.” - Harvey Cox, Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, Harvard University, and author of The Future of FaithIn God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World, New York Times bestselling author of Religious Literacy and religion scholar Stephen Prothero argues that persistent attempts in modern theo...

Before he became a counterculture hero, Alan Watts was known as an incisive scholar of Eastern and Western psychology and philosophy. In this 1961 classic, Watts demonstrates his deep understanding of both Western psychotherapy and the Eastern spiritual philosophies of Buddhism, Taoism, Vedanta, and Yoga. He examined the problem of humans in a seemingly hostile universe in ways that questioned the social norms and illusions that bind and constrict modern humans. Marking a groundbreaking sy...

In this innovative and deeply felt work, Bron Taylor examines the evolution of "green religions" in North America and beyond: spiritual practices that hold nature as sacred and have in many cases replaced traditional religions. Tracing a wide range of groups—radical environmental activists, lifestyle-focused bioregionalists, surfers, new-agers involved in "ecopsychology," and groups that hold scientific narratives as sacred—Taylor addresses a central theoretical question: How can environme...

Religious terrorism has become the scourge of the modern world. What causes a person to kill innocent strangers in the name of religion? As both a clinical psychologist and an authority on comparative religion, James W. Jones is uniquely qualified to address this increasingly urgent question. Research on the psychology of violence shows that several factors work to make ordinary people turn "evil." These include feelings of humiliation or shame, a tendency to see the world in black and whi...

" A classic for our time, a testimony matching our best efforts to keep the faith and celebrate the diversity around us." —Francis X. Clooney, SJ, Parkman Professor of Divinity and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard UniversityGod's Other Children by Bradley Malkovsky is a charming spiritual travelogue that tells the tale of a Catholic religious scholar who goes to India to study Hinduism and winds up falling in love with and ma...

The Christian faith is often charged with being outmoded and anachronistic. A monolithic institution rooted in the past, many critics have claimed that it lacks the resources to adapt to modern society's needs and advances. In "Rethinking Christianity", Keith Ward argues persuasively that this view is not only uncharitable, but refuted by historical evidence. Mapping the evolution of six major beliefs, from the Hellenistic restatement to the challenged of evolutionary theory, Ward demonstr...

This timely book aims to change the way we think about religion by putting emotion back onto the agenda. It challenges a tendency to over-emphasise rational aspects of religion, and rehabilitates its embodied, visceral and affective dimensions. Against the view that religious emotion is a purely private matter, it offers a new framework which shows how religious emotions arise in the varied interactions between human agents and religious communities, human agents and objects of devotion, a...

In On Religious Diversity Robert McKim distinguishes and examines a number of possible responses to the knowledge of diverse religious traditions that is available to all of us today. There is no escaping the fact that the presence of competing traditions now confronts each of the traditions in a new and forceful way. And there is widespread if inchoate recognition of genuine religious sensibilities and genuine religious seriousness in others. How might, and how should, an awarene...

This book offers scholars who ground their research in compassion and pacifism a new framework for the socio-political analysis of current global events. By tackling a broad range of critical themes in various disciplines, the essays compose a critical narrative of the ways in which power and violence shape society, culture, and belief. In addition to the contemporary dynamics of international economics, political murder, and the rhetorical antagonism between Christianity and Islam, the bo...

From ancient myths to the world’s great religions, Dr. Shearer expands our knowledge of how humans perceive, think, and shape our relationships with the Divine. Toward Interfaith Harmony: Why People Believe or Not, and Where Differences Take Us Next teaches that by understanding ourselves, we dare to transcend mere tolerance and to celebrate the differences that make us whole.