Eastern Light In Western Eyes

Marty Glass lives with his wife Carol beyond the power and water lines in Humboldt County, California, relying on his 1965 pick-up truck "Old Brown" to take him the final two miles up a dirt road to his owner-built home. He has worked as a college English instructor, wharehouseman, and janitor. A devoted father of five children, loving husband and neighbor, he now teaches sixth grade in a rural elementary school, and plays jazz piano and cards. For the past thirty years, he has seriously practiced the religion of India, spending the long necessary hours meditating in "Marty's Cell," an old chicken coop reborn as an austere shrine. His spiritual practice is his real life. Marty's acclaimed book Yuga: An Anatomy of our Fate, was published by Sophia Perennis in 2001. He now gives us perhaps his most beautiful and thoughtful gift, reminding us that the world is woven of the infinite Love and Joy that is God, and showing us how, inspired by the Hindu tradition, that Love and Joy can be directly experienced as the heart of the universe and the heart of our hearts. We have it from Frithjof Schuon (The Transcendent Unity of Religions) and many others that the Vedanta appears among explicit doctrines as one of the most direct formulations possible of what makes the very essence of our spiritual reality. The work in hand can be read as a book-length unpacking of that accurate description. Reliable from beginning to end, it is distinctive among the innumerable renditions of the Vedanta in two ways. First, because its author is an accomplished wordsmith, he makes the Vedanta's profundities-which delve as deep as those of any philosophical theology-read like an open book; and second, because he has worked for thirty years to shape his life by those profundities, his vivid accounts of what he experienced along the way make his words jump off the page into the reader's heart. The book is inspiring. Huston Smith, author of Why Religion Matters, The World's Religions, etc.

In the last decade, Eastern Orthodoxy has moved from being virtually unknown to Western Christians to being a significant presence on the religious scene in North America and Great Britain. In light of Orthodoxy's growing presence, this book will introduce Western Christians to the Eastern Orthodox vision of the Christian life by examining Orthodox theology and worship and will also alert readers to the cultural and historical factors that shape any interpretation of the Christian faith.