Sacred Commerce

In this timely book, authors Matthew and Terces Engelhart present the idea that love before appearances is the antidote to our spiritual, environmental, and social degradation. Exploring topics such as mission statements, manager as coach, human resources as a sacred culture, and inspirational meetings, they offer a manual for building a spiritual community at the workplace—a vital concept in an age when work consumes the bulk of most adults’ time. Business, the authors explain, is all about providing a service, product, or experience the market wants, and no business can succeed by failing to understand this point. However, integrating the concept of “Sacred Commerce” into business can provide both financial success and spiritual satisfaction. Stressing that every business is an opportunity to make a lasting impact on the lives of both clients and employees, the Engelharts share the tools they’ve learned in their own enterprises to fulfill this vision. Sacred Commerce is the ideal mix of the personal and the practical—a guidebook written by people who have felt success, not just spent it. Dissatisfaction with work is at record levels, and the Engelharts show that you don’t have to suffer personally—or give up your humanity—to pay the mortgage.

Sacred Commerce is a groundbreaking book which explores the past and the future of commerce. It tells of the Merchant Priests of ancient Egypt who practiced it and the skill of emotional alchemy they mastered in their pursuit of beauty goodness and truth. This book completes Ayman's work on the map of Emotional Intelligence and its four cornerstone model as explored in his international best seller "Executive EQ: Emotional Intelligence in Leadership and Organizations", co-authored with Dr. Robert Cooper.

Saint Francis of Assisi is arguably the most attractive saint ever produced by the Catholic Church. Based on a reconsideration of the earliest biographies of the saint, and Francis's own writings, this title sheds light on the inherent ironies of poverty as a spiritual discipline and its relationship to poverty as a socio-economic affliction.

Literary depictions of the sacred and the secular from the Middle Ages are representative of the era's widely held cultural understandings related to religion and the nature of lived experience. Using late Medieval English literature, including some of Chaucer's writings, these essays do not try to define a secular realm distinct and separate from the divine or religious, but instead analyze intersections of the sacred and the profane, suggesting that these two categories are mutually constitutive rather than antithetical. With essays by former students of John V. Fleming, the collection pays tribute to the Princeton University professor emeritus through wide-ranging scholarship and literary criticism. Including reflections on depictions of Bathsheba, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer's Pardoner, and Margery Kempe, these essays focus on literature while ranging into history, philosophy, and the visual arts. Taken together, the work suggests that the domain of the sacred, as perceived in the Middle Ages, can variously be seen as having a hierarchical or a complementary relationship to the things of this world.

Infused with visionary power, Sacred America, Sacred World is a manifesto for our country’s evolution that is both political and deeply spiritual. It offers profound hope that America can grow beyond our current challenges and manifest our noblest destiny, which the book shows is rooted in sacred principles that transcend left or right political views. Filled with practical ideas and innovative strategies honed from the author’s work with over 1000 luminaries via his company, The Shift Network, Sacred America, Sacred World rings with a can-do entrepreneurial spirit and explains how America can lead the world toward peace, sustainability, health, and prosperity. This vision of the future weaves the best of today’s emergent spirituality with seasoned political wisdom, demonstrating ways America can grow beyond its current stagnation and political gridlock to become a world leader in peace and progress. Published to coincide with the party conventions and presidential debates, this book will promote a return to the sacred principles cherished by America's forefathers in order to create a “transpartisan,” non-ideological, pragmatic approach to social reform. This uplifting discussion explores evolutions in political leadership, environmental concerns, and economic reformation. It is time to forge a bold new image of America’s future. Here is a road map for getting there.