Heart to Heart--The Journey Outward


Book Description

Whether religiously theists, atheists, agnostics, or simply seekers, each of us is on a journey of faith, spiraling through stages, seasons, or phases of spirituality. On this journey, we discover that spirituality is more caught than taught, and that faith, enriched more by subtraction than by addition, is more about unlearning than learning. At the center of Jesus’ life and message stands the exhortation to receive and share divine love. The two volumes of Heart to Heart, excerpted from Dr. Vande Kappelle’s published writings, examine the meaning and implications of the biblical Great Commandment to love God and others as oneself. Whereas the first volume examines the spiritual journey inward, this companion volume examines the journey outward. Ultimately there is only one spiritual journey—the journey Godward—and there is only one commandment. Divine love is the key to everything. Unloved people misbehave, fail to love, or fail to change. Loved people aren’t concerned with rules, regulations, or beliefs. Rather, because they are loved, they take proper care of themselves, and in so doing, care for nature and others as extensions of themselves. Heart to Heart is written for those who affirm the value of lifelong spiritual growth, realize the limits of logic, and embrace the paradoxes in life. If you are willing to commit less than ten minutes a day over a seven-month period, you will undertake a spiritual journey of epic proportions, guaranteed to transform you morally and spiritually. In addition, you will come to embrace Christianity as the transformative movement envisioned by Jesus for humanity, a way of life grounded in compassion, justice, service, humility, and love of others.




Heart to Heart—The Journey Inward


Book Description

Whether religiously theists, atheists, agnostics, or simply seekers, each of us is on a journey of faith, spiraling through stages, seasons, or phases of spirituality. On this journey, we discover that spirituality is more caught than taught, and that faith, enriched more by subtraction than by addition, is more about unlearning than learning. At the center of Jesus' life and message stands the exhortation to receive and share divine love. The two volumes of Heart to Heart, excerpted from Dr. Vande Kappelle's published writings, examine the meaning and implications of the biblical Great Commandment to love God and others as oneself. This volume examines the spiritual journey inward, and its companion volume, the journey outward. Ultimately there is only one spiritual journey--the journey Godward--and there is only one commandment. Divine love is the key to everything. Unloved people misbehave, fail to love, or fail to change. Loved people aren't concerned with rules, regulations, or beliefs. Rather, because they are loved, they take proper care of themselves, and in so doing, care for nature and others as extensions of themselves. Heart to Heart is written for those who affirm the value of lifelong spiritual growth, realize the limits of logic, and embrace the paradoxes in life. If you are willing to commit less than ten minutes a day over a seven-month period, you will undertake a spiritual journey of epic proportions, guaranteed to transform you morally and spiritually. In addition, you will come to embrace Christianity as the transformative movement envisioned by Jesus for humanity, a way of life grounded in compassion, justice, service, humility, and love of others.







Journey of Heart


Book Description

Join Sequoia in this inspiring autobiographical adventure of her courageous trek as she leaves behind the safe, familiar surroundings of her home and travels across continents to a remote corner of the planet to "respect the mountain and the climbers who came before" her. She discovers a whole new world, both inside and outside of herself, on this Journey of Heart.




Renovation of the Heart


Book Description

As Christians, we know that we are new creations in Jesus. So we try to act differently, hoping this will make us more like Him. But changing our outward behavior doesn’t change our hearts. Only by God’s grace can we be transformed internally. Renovation of the Heart lays a biblical foundation for understanding what best-selling author Dallas Willard calls the “transformation of the spirit”—a divine process that “brings every element in our being, working from inside out, into harmony with the will of God.” This fresh approach to spiritual growth explains the biblical reasons why Christians need to undergo change in six aspects of life: thought, feeling, will, body, social context, and soul. Willard also outlines a general pattern of transformation in each area, not as a sterile formula but as a practical process that you can follow without the guilt or perfectionism so many Christians wrestle with. Don’t settle for complacency. Accept the challenge Renovation of the Heart offers to become an intentional apprentice of Jesus Christ, changing daily as you walk with Him.




Our Exodus Story


Book Description

Every person has an exodus story, a vast, complex, multilayered spiritual journey. On the one hand, it is a biological journey from birth to death, and a social journey from infancy to adulthood. In this regard, it is a story of growing up, of leaving home and taking risks, of making mistakes and learning from them, of reaching goals and surpassing them. Our Exodus Story speaks of human life as a gossamer bridge that binds us as people with God, others, and with our inner being. This journey of faith is described as a “holy balancing act” between the three sources of authority for people of faith—experience, Scripture, and tradition. Bonded umbilically to one another and to God, each of us bears exodus-like and cross-like experiences. Personality and spirituality are deeply interrelated, so much that neither function adequately apart from the other. Though not identical, they strive to be in sync, balancing one another in profound and intimate ways. Personality takes the lead, and where personality goes, spirituality follows, though not blindly or passively. Spirituality has its own voice, and when its desires are addressed and heeded, personality thrives. This book is unique in that each of its four protagonists exhibits distinct dominant personality characteristics, their experiences bearing archetypal relevance and universal appeal. Their stories, individual and combined, are epic, the protagonists and families as complex as their biblical patriarchal and matriarchal counterparts, yet as current as today’s top stories. As you read, you are invited on your own inner journey to peace, wholeness, and well-being.




Our Life Is Love


Book Description

Our Life is Love describes the transformational spiritual journey of the first Quakers, who turned to the Light of Christ within and allowed it to be their guide. Many Friends today use different language, but are still called to make the same journey. In our time people seeking deeper access to the profound teachings of Christianity want more than just beliefs, they want direct experience. Focusing on ten elements of the spiritual journey, this book is a guide to a Spirit-filled life that affects this world. Quakers in the seventeenth century and today provide examples of people and communities living in the midst of the world whose radical understanding of Christ's teachings led them to become powerful agents of social change. The book offers a simple, clear explanation of the spiritual journey that is suitable not only for Quakers, but for all Christians, and for seekers wanting to better understand our spiritual experience and the fullness of God's call to us. The book would make an excellent focus for study groups. Marcelle Martin has led workshops at retreat centers and Quaker meetings across the United States. She served for four years as the resident Quaker Studies teacher at Pendle Hill and was a core teacher in the School of the Spirit program, The Way of Ministry. She is the author of the Pendle Hill pamphlets Invitation to a Deeper Communion and Holding One Another in the Light. In 2013 she was the Mullen Writing Fellow at Earlham School of Religion while working on this book.




Lightning Flowers


Book Description

This "utterly spectacular" book weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author's life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises). What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots. From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.




The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing


Book Description

Fiction. Deep in the mountains of British Columbia, across an unforgiving landscape, one man's pursuit of a fabled mountain lion leads him into the furthest reaches of himself. As he struggles to confront the wilderness surrounding him--from the baying hounds to the relentless northern snows--he journeys into his own haunted memories: a life of wild horses and ballet, fishing skiffs and blizzards, tropical seas and dolphins. Through wind, snow, and the depths of grief, he asks what price he is willing to exact on a world that ravages what we love, and whether redemption awaits those who learn to forgive. A tender story of love and a modern-day parable, The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing, the debut novel from acclaimed poet Joseph Fasano, guides us into the deepest territories of the human heart. "Joseph Fasano has the heart and the ear and he puts them to magnificent use in THE DARK HEART OF EVERY WILD THING. By turns mournful and thrilling, this story, told in precise and glorious prose, traverses the wild heights of grief, vengeance, tenderness, and love. It pierces."--Sam Lipsyte "A father, a boy, and a mountain lion. If it sounds like the start of a parable, that's because THE DARK HEART OF EVERY WILD THING has wisdom to share. But that wisdom is complicated, surprising, and at times even vicious. What seems at first like a quiet book is actually quite fierce, not unlike the big cat at the center of its story. This elegiac novel is a moving meditation on grief, love, and obsession."--Erica Wright "Joseph Fasano is a wonderfully gifted writer. He writes evocatively, lyrically, and never fails to surprise us with his revelations and illuminations. His insights are deep, his delineation of character and place immensely satisfying. He gives us a story that keeps resonating long after we have finished reading."--Nicholas Christopher




A Man After His Own Heart


Book Description

Somewhere on this earth tonight, somewhere, I believe, not very far from me, there is a person whose heart I've touched. A person whose heart I've held in my hand. . . . So begins A Man After His Own Heart, an extraordinary narrative by acclaimed author, essayist, and poet Charles Siebert on that most elusive of topics--the human heart. On a rainy December night one recent winter, Siebert was given the rare opportunity to accompany a team of surgeons both in the harvesting of a human heart from the body of a young woman who'd recently died of a brain aneurysm, and in the subsequent delivery and implantation of that heart into the hollowed-out chest of a waiting recipient. Beginning with his harrowing week-long wait for the harvest call to come and culminating with the moment in which one of the implant surgeons suddenly, inexplicably, places the author's hand on the wildly beating reanimated heart, Siebert manages to weave a seamless series of ruminations and reflections about his own obsession with the heart and his often-estranged father's fatal heart disease; about history's ongoing fascination with this most central and vital organ; and about modern science's latest startling discoveries concerning both the heart's biological origins and its long-intuited role in the play of our emotions. The resulting mix is nothing less than a radically new, definitive biography of life's most pondered and poeticized protagonist. This story is a journey into the literal and figurative heart of our being, revealing the previously unexplored ways in which the matter of modern science and timeless metaphor meet.