The Search For Spirituality

Full of vision, hope, and inspiration, this profound and passionate manifesto provides a fascinating overview of the incredibly rich and diverse spiritual landscapes of the world?feeding a deep longing for a life of wholeness and meaning and a society of greater peace and justice. Drawing from a wide variety of faiths and secular traditions, this book looks at cultural diversity and religious pluralism; clarifies the meaning of spirituality in different languages, faiths, and societies; and shows how numerous new approaches to spirituality have emerged. Also explored are the spiritual dimensio.

Channeling the deep, mysterious desires of our hearts, Ronald Rolheiser leads readers from restlessness to peace, showing a contemporary path to authentic and healthy spiritual life—now featuring a new reader’s guide! In The Holy Longing, Ronald Rolheiser probes the question “What is spirituality?”, cutting through the misunderstanding and confusion that can often surround this subject with his trademark clarity. Using examples and stories relevant for today, and with great sensitivity to modern challenges to religious faith, he explains the essentials of spiritual life, including the importance of community worship, the imperatives surrounding social action, and the centrality of the Incarnation, to outline a Christian spirituality that reflects the yearning and search for meaning at the core of the human experience. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what Christian spirituality means and how to apply it to their own lives, The Holy Longing translates the universal struggle for love and integration of spirit into a language accessible to all, explaining God and the Church for a world that more often than not doubts the credibility of both.

I Am Not Perfect is a simple statement of profound truth, the first step toward understanding the human condition, for to deny your essential imperfection is to deny yourself and your own humanity. The spirituality of imperfection, steeped in the rich traditions of the Hebrew prophets and Greek thinkers, Buddhist sages and Christian disciples, is a message as timeless as it is timely. This insightful work draws on the wisdom stories of the ages to provide an extraordinary wellspring of hope and inspiration to anyone thirsting for spiritual growth and guidance in these troubled times. Who are we? Why so we so often fall short of our goals for ourselves and others? By seeking to understand our limitations and accept the inevitably of failure and pain, we being to ease the hurt and move toward a greater sense of serenity and self-awareness. The Spirituality Of Imperfection brings together stories from many spiritual and philosophical paths, weaving past traditions into a spirituality and a new way of thinking and living that works today. It speaks so anyone who yearns to find meaning within suffering. Beyond theory and technique, inside this remarkable book you will find a new way of thinking, a way of living that enables a truly human existence.

Examining the work and writings of such figures as Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Starhawk, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Sonial Johnson and Mary Daly, the author illustrates how these writers and activists outline a journey toward wholeness.

The first volume of this Opera Omnia has been divided into two books, one dedicated to mysticism, intended as the supreme experience of reality, and the second dedicated to spirituality, intended as the path toward such an experience. There are different paths, because they depend not only on tradition and worship but also on the different sensitivities of human beings and historical periods. What kind of spirituality is appropriate to our times? ... The book starts with two booklets in which some lines of argument, developed in the context of Christian religious retreats, were spelled out in the plain language of everyday speech. The second section deals with a spirituality practiced by monks, although not confined to institutional monasticism, but seen rather as a universal archetype to be found in very human being (the search for monos, union with the Divine). There follows a description of the ascetic tradition in India and, as an example of the encounter of western (Christian) spirituality with Indic spirituality, an article dedicated to my friend Henri Le Saux, who is an example of the fertile encounter between the two traditions. The last section is dedicated to wisdom as the goal of a positive spirituality. (from the Introduction).

This book delves into the world of global spiritual traditions by scrutinizing their foundational beliefs, rituals, and wisdom. The book digs deep into how these diverse practices and teachings guide individuals in their quest for purpose and meaning. Exploring spiritual paths worldwide unveils insights into achieving a fulfilled life rooted in spiritual discovery. The book journeys through diverse spiritual traditions, from the Eastern wisdom of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism to the foundational beliefs of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and beyond to indigenous and new-age spiritual movements. Discover the transformative power of spiritual practices and rituals, and learn how spirituality can offer solace in times of challenge, guiding towards a life of fulfilment.

This interdisciplinary book examines the nature of spirituality and the role it plays in the search for meaning. Spirituality is a loving tendency towards the sacred. In a secular environment, the sacred is taken to be a power greater than self. In a religious environment, the Sacred refers to God, or Higher Power. The book examines the developments of the s/Sacred in great works of art and literature, as well as in medicine, theology, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Spirituality also functions as an unloving tendency towards disunity, or a force for evil. The first part of the book examines the ways of the spiritual as a force for good and evil. We have just witnessed one of the bloodiest centuries in human history. The experience of two World Wars leaves a legacy of brokenness: “Where Nossack’s reminiscences bore poetic, compassionate, and personal witness to the disaster, Eliot’s poetry reads more like a sacred and religious poem taking contemporary Western European civilization to task—much like the biblical prophets of old—for its spiritual bankruptcy.” Albert Einstein, Edvard Munch’s Madonna, and Carl Jung’s ‘unconscious’ touch the curve of the Sacred in more promising places. The second part examines how the search for meaning works. The distinction between being human and being a person plays a central role in the life of the spiritual; “...the spiritual is manifest in the activities taking place in the central self. The central self is the locus of all thoughts, feelings, acts of reason and judgment, conscious and unconscious processes alike. The central self is the place where social relationships and environmental relationships are processed. The essential feature of the central self is that it does not exist outside these processes.” The same spiritual energies that light up great works of art also light up our destructive side, only the associations’ change.