Commune with these thirty-four unique stories of the moment of enlightenment from ancient and modern masters, and find oneness and absolute freedom.From the Buddha's experience under the Bodhi tree to Eckhart Tolle's realization of the "power of now," Mystics, Masters, Saints, and Sages brings together stories and writings on moments of spiritual enlightenment by ancient and modern masters. With selections from religious traditions including Christianity, I...

Mystics, Masters, Saints, and Sages is a compilation of more than thirty unique stories in the lives of ancient and modern saints and masters—from the Buddha to Rumi, from St. John of the Cross to Eckhart Tolle. Regardless of religious traditions, these stories focus on moments of profound spiritual enlightenment. With selections from religious traditions including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Bahá'i, and Sufism, this collection provides a broad spectrum of sp...

Why does the Bible depict a world in which humans, with surprising regularity, encounter the divine—wrestling an angel, addressing a burning bush, issuing forth prophecy without any choice in the matter? These stories spoke very differently to their original audience than they do to us, and they reflect a radically distinct understanding of reality and the human mind. Yet over the course of the thousand-year Biblical Era, encounters with God changed dramatically. As James Kugel argues, thi...

The bestselling author of A Wrinkle in Time contemplates the true meaning of faith in the third installment of her series of memoirs.Upon her death, the New York Times hailed Madeleine L’Engle as “an author whose childhood fables, religious meditations and fanciful science fiction transcended both genre and generation.” L’Engle has long captivated and provoked readers by exploring the intersection of science and religion in her work. In this intim...

The pioneering spiritual scholar discusses how to find genuine optimism in times of crisis by contemplating the ultimate reality of God.Dr. Beatrice Bruteau was an inspiration to some of the most influential spiritual thinkers of our time. With a background in Vedanta, Catholic contemplation, and the natural sciences, she developed a broadly inclusive, interspiritual vision of human reality. In Radical Optimism she shines new light on the deepest truth we ...

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“Everybody telephones everybody at every possible moment, and nobody can speak to anybody … Distance has been the warp that supports the weft of every love story.”—from Numbers in the DarkWritten between 1943 and 1984, the stories in Numbers in the Darkspan the career of one of fiction’s modern masters: from Italo Calvino’s earliest fables, to tales informed by life in World War II–era Italy, to the delightful experimentation that would define his later work.Here are specula...

Nobody expected the liberation of India and birth of Pakistan to be so bloody—it was supposed to be an answer to the dreams of Muslims and Hindus who had been ruled by the British for centuries. Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi's protégé and the political leader of India, believed that Indians were an inherently nonviolent, peaceful people. Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a secular lawyer, not a firebrand. But in August 1946, exactly a year before Independence, Calcutta erupted in str...

Deciding that her life was insufficiently grounded in real-world experience, the author, a Quaker reared as a Catholic, embarked on a year of tending sheep. In this often hilarious book, she describes her time in the barn as well as an extended visit to a Buddhist monastery in France.

Susan Tate Ankeny was sorting through the belongings of her late father—a World War II bombardier who had bailed from a burning B-17 over Nazi-occupied France in 1944—when she found two boxes. One contained her dad's Air Force uniform, and the other an unfinished memoir, stacks of envelopes, black-and-white photographs, mission reports, dog tags, and the fake identity cards he used in his escape. Ankeny spent more than a decade from that moment tracking down letter writers, their loved one...

There's a precise moment that falls between working enough hours to be productive and working too many hours, yielding a diminishing marginal return. The difference between the person able to master this and most Americans that fail miserably at it is quality of life! If one continues to work past this moment, a negative return will ensue, and that negative return produces guilt. It lowers the amount of time for recreational activities and spending time with family.An alarming 39% ...

A historical tour de force that demolishes the myths and taboos that have surrounded Jewish and Israeli history, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a new account of both that demands to be reckoned with. Was there really a forced exile in the first century, at the hands of the Romans? Should we regard the Jewish people, throughout two millennia, as both a distinct ethnic group and a putative nation—returned at last to its Biblical homeland?Shlomo Sand argues that mo...