Beauty Beyond The Threshold

Travel. Inspiration. Motherhood... and Depression. 264 million people worldwide suffer from depression. For anyone struggling with depression, anxiety, finding joy in life, living with purpose, or even just bad days, Beauty Beyond the Threshold, How International Volunteering Saved My Life is a story of hitting rock bottom; one woman’s journey to recovery and self-discovery. Readers will go on adventures through heartache, loss, and despair as well as find themselves repairing homes in Puerto Rico and North Carolina, building schools in remote villages in Nepal, laughing with generous people, crying tears of joy, and reflecting on their own lives. Beauty Beyond the Threshold brings hope to those who are feeling sad, depressed, and anxious. There is so much beauty beyond the threshold and the path to discover it is by taking that first step outside of your comfort zone.

Beyond the Threshold is the first book to seriously consider the interplay between traditional world religions and metaphysical experiences in exploring the timeless question of what happens when we die. Christopher M. Moreman examines and compares the beliefs and practices of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, as well as psychic phenomena such as mediums and near-death experiences. While ultimately the afterlife remains unknowable, Moreman's unique, in-depth exploration of both beliefs and experiences can help readers reach their own understanding of the afterlife and how to live.

From the author of the bestselling Anam Cara comes a beautiful collection of blessings to help readers through both the everyday and the extraordinary events of their lives. John O’Donohue, Irish teacher and poet, has been widely praised for his gift of drawing on Celtic spiritual traditions to create words of inspiration and wisdom for today. In To Bless the Space Between Us, his compelling blend of elegant, poetic language and spiritual insight offers readers comfort and encouragement on their journeys through life. O’Donohue looks at life’s thresholds—getting married, having children, starting a new job—and offers invaluable guidelines for making the transition from a known, familiar world into a new, unmapped territory. Most profoundly, however, O’Donohue explains “blessing” as a way of life, as a lens through which the whole world is transformed. O’Donohue awakens readers to timeless truths and shows the power they have to answer contemporary dilemmas and ease us through periods of change.

"This is the story of a religiously motivated young woman who was manipulated, turned into a fanatic, and only gradually came to her senses - all because of a religious organization working in the highest echelons of the Roman Catholic Church: Opus Dei, "God's Work." Much has been written about Opus Dei, which during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II has become the most powerful organization in the Roman Catholic Church. Described as a "Holy Mafia" by its critics, "The Work," as it is known, has been charged with secrecy, elitism, reactionary politics, and questionable financial practices. But no one until now has described the inner workings of Opus Dei, from its goals and methods to the actual day-to-day activities of it members, with as much thoroughness and detail as Maria del Carmen Tapia." "The author describes what she calls the making and unmaking of a fanatic. There is the devious recruitment, the forced estrangement from her family, the indoctrination, life in the "Golden Cage" of Opus Dei's governing center in Rome, her years as head of the women's section in Venezuela, her sudden recall to Rome, where for seven months she was held virtually prisoner, and finally the reprisals after she left the organization." "In this strongest indictment of Opus Dei to date, Maria del Carmen Tapia reveals the dark side of "The Work": its duplicity, questionable recruitment practices, shocking disregard for human rights, and the unwholesome cult of its founder."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In The Threshold of the Visible World Kaja Silverman advances a revolutionary new political aesthetic, exploring the possibilities for looking beyond the restrictive mandates of the self, and the normative aspects of the cultural image-repertoire. She provides a detailed account of the social and psychic forces which constrain us to look and identify in normative ways, and the violence which that normativity implies.

Owen Barfield is known primarily for his many publications on the evolution of consciousness and the essential reframing of cultural history that results from this theory. At the center of his philosophy is a deep analysis of mythology and poetics that draws from Coleridge, Steiner, and others to reveal the noetic role of the poetic principle and its salient shifts that map the evolution of conscious experience. A member of the Oxford Inklings group, Barfield’s first published book, The Silver Trumpet (1925), is the first märchen, or fantasy story, published by any of them. Despite the influence Barfield exerted on contemporary authors such as Howard Nemerov and Saul Bellow, the biggest gaps in the published corpus of the Philosopher of Poetry are most of the major poems and poetic dramas he wrote according to his theories that place poetics at the core of conscious experience itself. This current publication remedies this absence by presenting five striking literary pieces composed throughout Barfield’s lifetime. The Tower, an introspective narrative poem, is the ‘great work’ of Barfield’s youth; Medea, a mythopoeic drama, is seemingly his last major poetic and dramatic work. Between these two are the mythopoeic narrative poem Riders on Pegasus, a trilogy of Anthroposophical mystery plays Angels at Bay, and the light-hearted extended poem The Unicorn. Readers of Barfield’s philosophical works and Inklings enthusiasts will find much to admire and enjoy in this volume.

After being given an apprenticeship to chart her entire kingdom, young Aoife encounters a secretive culture of wealthy and peaceful people who she protects by enduring a harrowing exile.