The search of your life is the search for your life. What you are holding right now is an exploration of the human spirit; a journey into our deepest longings, our desires, our needs, our cravings, our souls. Our need for intimacy, meaning, and destiny point to the existence of God and our need to connect with Him. This book will deeply stir you to consider and chase after the spiritual implications of your souls' deepest longings.
Adventures in the Human Spirit provides a balanced introduction to the major arts, philosophy, and religion. Appropriate for students with little background in the arts and humanities, this single-volume text approaches the humanities by focusing on principal events, styles, movements, and figures. The seventh edition engages students with new chapter-opening spreads, a refreshed color palette, and a clear pedagogical structure. New author Margaret Manos maintains the late Philip E. Bishop’s approachability to understanding western humanities, bringing the past to life. The new edition continues to contain Bishop’s coverage of music, religion, literature, philosophy, and science.
In this volume, Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle probes significant concepts of the human spirit in Western religious culture across more than two millennia, from the book of Genesis to early modern science. The Human Spirit treats significant interpretations of human nature as religious in political, philosophical, and physical aspects by tracing its historical subject through the Priestly tradition of the Hebrew Bible and the writings of the apostle Paul among the Corinthians, the innovative theologians Augustine and Aquinas, the reformatory theologian Calvin, and the natural philosopher and physician William Harvey. Boyle analyzes the particular experiences and notions of these influential authors while she contextualizes them in community. She shows how they shared a conviction, although distinctly understood, of the human spirit as endowed by or designed by a divine source of everything animate. An original and erudite work that utilizes a rich and varied array of primary source material, this volume will be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians of religion, philosophy, literature, and medicine.
Exploring the Human Spirit is a collection of essays Richard Dance wrote for a study group that grew out of an East-West philosophy course he taught at several colleges in Arizona. His philosophy students asked him to start a study group to explore more deeply the ideas presented in the class. He obliged by writing essays on various topics that he thought would benefit others, and everyone met at his home monthly for a presentation on each essay. These Mindful Medicine Salons unfolded spontaneously over two years with several hundred participants in attendance, creating a wonderful sense of community in the pursuit of self-knowledge. Great thanks go to all the students without whom this book would have never existed.
Avenues of the Human Spirit takes us on a compelling journey through many life-changing experiences towards a greater sense of spiritual fulfillment. Genuine life changing experiences such as perceptions through time, out-of-body experiences and a profound spiritual awakening illustrate how the author reached a philosophy of benevolence and freedom that we too can draw upon in our everyday lives. These Avenues of the Human Spirit are the ecstatic changes we can experience beyond our bodies, in deep meditation or removed from the everyday world in nature, but they are also the everyday choices we make that define our world. The author's spiritual awareness has also grown from an understanding of the spectrum of human experience, from the harsher sides of his childhood in working class London to the joys of spiritual exploration. The result of these combined perceptions is what makes Avenues of the Human Spirit a unique and life-affirming book.
What are we to make of direct spiritual experience? Of accounts of going to heaven or meeting angels? Traditional science would call these hallucinations or delusions. Clinical psychologist Dr. Mark Yama argues the opposite. Through interviews with his patients, he shows that underneath the visions and experiences there is a unifying spiritual reality apart from the material world. One of the stories recounted in this book is the experience of a woman who could see the future. In a spiritual transport, she was taken to heaven where truths were revealed to her that she later discovered were already written in Gnostic scripture. Another woman lived a life marked by a spiritual sensitivity that defied materialist explanation. After she passed away of cancer, she came to inhabit the consciousness of another of Dr. Yama's patients in the form of a benign possession. These stories, and many others, argue for a deeper reality that places spirituality on an equal footing with the material world.
Whitley, one of the world's leading experts on cave paintings, rewrites the understanding of shamanism and its connection with artistic creativity, myth, and religion by interweaving archaeological evidence with the latest findings of cutting-edge neuroscience.
"Kryon speaks of new human empowerment and says that we all meta-phorically "stood in line" to be here on the planet at this particular time. Can we really become different? Can we actually create our own reality or heal ourselves? Absolutely!"
Expanded from the Chief Rabbi of South Africa's doctoral thesis, Defending the Human Spirit explores the Torah's legal system compared to Western law. Using real court cases to demonstrate the similarities and differences between Judaism's view of defending the vulnerable and Western legal practice, Rabbi Goldstein places halacha as truly ahead of its time. Covering such diverse topics as political tyranny, oppression of women, crime, and poverty, Defending the Human Spirit is fascinating, informative and inspiring reading.
This provocative and timely text advocates an expanded ethic oriented toward ecosystem sustainability and focuses on the role of nature in maintaining the human spirit. Diverse views are put forth in 38 chapters by 49 authors who represent all types of users and interests. This text presents a balanced, in-depth perspective on this difficult topic of hard-to-define values. The text encourages a sense of awe about the complexity of natural systems as it redefines the words spirit and spirituality by redirecting the reader from the realms of the sectarian, religious, or mystical toward a nature-based meaning. This perspective encompasses the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, social, and economic well-being of people and communities, emphasizing the sameness of humans and land, and it lays the groundwork for an understanding of, and a need for an expanded land management ethic.
