The Soul S Calendar

This collection of daily thoughts to nourish the soul from the world’s sacred texts by Leo Tolstoy feature gems of inspiration and wisdom—author Thomas Keneally calls this book “transcendent, and that we are grateful he lived long enough to endow us with his grand inheritance.” This is the first-ever English-language edition of the book Leo Tolstoy considered to be his most important contribution to humanity, the work of his life's last years. Widely read in pre-revolutionary Russia, banned and forgotten under Communism; and recently rediscovered to great excitement, A Calendar of Wisdom is a day-by-day guide that illuminates the path of a life worth living with a brightness undimmed by time. Unjustly censored for nearly a century, it deserves to be placed with the few books in our history that will never cease teaching us the essence of what is important in this world.

This book takes a completely new look at the Anthroposophical Soul Calendar. It is abaout the deeper meaning of the fifty-two weekly verses, which has remained essentially unexplored in the last hundred years since the first edition by Rudolf Steiner. A dense veil of Isis was spread over them, of which is well known that no mortal person can lift it. Only the immortal, psycho-spiritual human being, who knows himself at home in the extrasensory, higher worlds, is capable of doing this. Only to him the weekly verses reveal themselves as a travel guide through these worlds and lift him up to ever higher spiritual-cosmic realms until he reaches the experience of God, from where he gradually descends again into a new life on Earth, enriched in spirit and fertilized in his soul. If the reader embarks on this journey, the spiritual archetype of the Soul Calendar is ultimately unveiled to him and he achieves an extended understanding of Man and Christ. By many quotations from Rudolf Steiner's lectures and books, the author virtually lets Steiners himself elucidate the breathtaking depths of his mysterious weekly verses.

St Paul's Cathedral stood at the centre of religious life in medieval London and this investigation of its chantries - pious foundations through which donors endowed priests to celebrate intercessory masses for the benefit of their souls - sheds light on the role chantries played in promoting the spiritual well-being of medieval London.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, a revelatory portrait of religion in China today—its history, the spiritual traditions of its Eastern and Western faiths, and the ways in which it is influencing China’s future. The Souls of China tells the story of one of the world’s great spiritual revivals. Following a century of violent anti-religious campaigns, China is now filled with new temples, churches, and mosques—as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty—over what it means to be Chinese and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is searching for new guideposts. Ian Johnson first visited China in 1984; in the 1990s he helped run a charity to rebuild Daoist temples, and in 2001 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement. While researching this book, he lived for extended periods with underground church members, rural Daoists, and Buddhist pilgrims. Along the way, he learned esoteric meditation techniques, visited a nonagenarian Confucian sage, and befriended government propagandists as they fashioned a remarkable embrace of traditional values. He has distilled these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions, and struggle—a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world’s newest superpower.

St Paul's Cathedral stood at the centre of religious life in medieval London. It was the mother church of the diocese, a principal landowner in the capital and surrounding countryside, and a theatre for the enactment of events of national importance. The cathedral was also a powerhouse of commemoration and intercession, where prayers and requiem masses were offered on a massive scale for the salvation of the living and the dead. This spiritual role of St Paul's Cathedral was carried out essentially by the numerous chantry priests working and living in its precinct. Chantries were pious foundations, through which donors, clerks or lay, male or female, endowed priests to celebrate intercessory masses for the benefit of their souls. At St Paul's Cathedral, they were first established in the late twelfth century and, until they were dissolved in 1548, they contributed greatly to the daily life of the cathedral. They enhanced the liturgical services offered by the cathedral, increased the number of the clerical members associated with it, and intensified relations between the cathedral and the city of London. Using the large body of material from the cathedral archives, this book investigates the chantries and their impacts on the life, services and clerical community of the cathedral, from their foundation in the early thirteenth century to the dissolution. It demonstrates the flexibility and adaptability of these pious foundations and the various contributions they made to medieval society; and sheds light on the men who played a role which, until the abolition of the chantries in 1548, was seen to be crucial to the spiritual well-being of medieval London.

This book reunites science and spirituality after her roads separated 300 years ago. More and more scientists are discovering that both disciplines are only two sides of the same coin. We are on the verge of a major paradigm change in science where the immaterial subjective world of the mind can no longer be separated from the objective material world. This leap in human consciousness was already foreseen by the ancients and American indigenous people like the Maya, Hopi and Aztecs who prophesized that this transformation of consciousness would take place in our time. This book takes you on a journey from the ancient wisdom to the most modern scientific insights and demonstrates how both can be united.

Two Troubled Souls: An Eighteenth-Century Couple's Spiritual Journey in the Atlantic World