Adventures In Religious Life


Book Description

This book is a collection of lectures delivered in Bangalore and Philadelphia by Swami Yatiswarananda, a disciple of Swami Brahmananda and the Vice-president of the Ramakrishna Order. The lectures were published in the magazines The Vedanta Kesari, Prabuddha Bharata, Vedanta and the West, and Vedanta for East and West. The lectures extensively deal with pursuing religious life, overcoming obstacles in religious life, achieving inner peace and harmony, and attaining religious experience. Spiritual seekers can derive the much-needed inspiration and succour from these invaluable lectures.










Meditation and Spiritual Life


Book Description




Adventures in Churchland


Book Description

Would Jesus Attend Church Today? Among the top ten trends that are changing American life, Time magazine recently listed a rising dissatisfaction with organized religion. Though many people today like Jesus, they are growing tired of traditional religious institutions. Even those who follow Jesus aren't so sure they always like what Christianity and the church represent. For many years, Dan Kimball would have agreed, until an encounter with a small group of Jesus followers started him on a journey that challenged him to rethink everything he had ever assumed about the church. In Adventures in Churchland, Dan invites you to join him as he uncovers what the Bible really says about the church and reminds us that it's more than just an institution; it's a beautiful mess of broken people learning to follow Jesus together. As you journey with Dan, you'll begin to see the church as Jesus intended it to be: a community of forgiven misfits coming together to serve the world around them with passion, creativity, innovation, and grace. "If you don’t like the church, or if you’re thinking about leaving, please read this book first. Dan’s stories will make you laugh, make you think, and make you appreciate the church like never before." – Mark Batterson, author of The Circle Maker "Dan encourages us to break through the tension and messiness that church communities inevitably encounter to experience the beauty of being in community and sharing God's infinite love with others." – Zach Lind, drummer, Jimmy Eat World "I am so glad that my friend Dan has written this book, because there is a lot of confusion out there about Jesus and the church." – Wanda Jackson, Queen of Rockabilly and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame




Adventures in Spirituality


Book Description

Contrary to popular culture, the goal of life is not happiness, but meaning. Those who seek happiness by trying to avoid or finesse conflict, suffering, doubt, and change will find life increasingly superficial. Feeling good is a flawed measure of life, but living meaningfully is transformative, for then one is living a developmental rather than a regressive agenda. The ego does whatever it can to make itself comfortable, whereas spirituality is about wholeness. Adventures in Spirituality represents the culmination of Dr. Vande Kappelle's forty-year teaching career, incorporating in one volume his views on topics as varied as theology, Christology, biblical interpretation, spirituality, ethics, world religions, religion and science, faith and reason, and church history. Reared in Costa Rica, the son of missionary parents, Dr. Vande Kappelle describes his journey from belief to faith as a transition from precritical to postcritical understanding, from evangelical Christianity to what he calls "alternative orthodoxy." Narrating the shift from first- to second-half-of-life experience, he introduces readers to core principles that shaped his values, thinking, and way of life. Useful for individual or group study, Adventures in Spirituality encourages readers to take risks with their lives and faith, affirming that this is how one grows spiritually.




Adventures in Missing the Point


Book Description

Examines how the complex issues of the world's culture has influenced the ministry and message of the Christian church on such topics as salvation, worship, the Bible, and sin.




Adventures in the Spirit


Book Description

In Adventures in the Spirit, respected and influential theologian Philip Clayton argues that two major intellectual movements of our day-panentheism and emergence-are converging and that together they offer exciting new vistas for theological reflection. On the one hand, over the last decades many theologians have been re-conceiving the God-world relation panentheistically, affirming a radical indwelling of God within the world and the world within God. On the other hand, scientists have begun to abandon the reductionist ideology that characterized much of the modern period, with a new emphasis on emergence. Their study of how new, novel structures and entities arise throughout the evolutionary process yields a much more open-ended, holistic vision of reality, Clayton argues.




The Liturgical Year


Book Description

A journey of the soul through the map of Christian time. The liturgical year, beginning on the first Sunday of Advent and carrying through the following November, is the year that sets out to attune the life of the Christian to the life of Jesus, the Christ. What may at first seem to be simply an arbitrary arrangement of ancient holy days, or liturgical seasons, this book explains their essential relationship to one another and their ongoing meaning to us today. It is an excursion into life from the Christian perspective, from the viewpoint of those who set out not only to follow Jesus but to live and think as Jesus did. And it proposes to help us to year after year immerse ourselves into the sense and substance of the Christian life until, eventually, we become what we say we are—followers of Jesus all the way to the heart of God. It is an adventure in human growth; it is an exercise in spiritual ripening. A volume in the eight book classic series, The Ancient Practices, with a foreword by Phyllis Tickle, General Editor.




Religion in American Life


Book Description

"Quite ambitious, tracing religion in the United States from European colonization up to the 21st century.... The writing is strong throughout."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "One can hardly do better than Religion in American Life.... A good read, especially for the uninitiated. The initiated might also read it for its felicity of narrative and the moments of illumination that fine scholars can inject even into stories we have all heard before. Read it."--Church History This new edition of Religion in American Life, written by three of the country's most eminent historians of religion, offers a superb overview that spans four centuries, illuminating the rich spiritual heritage central to nearly every event in our nation's history. Beginning with the state of religious affairs in both the Old and New Worlds on the eve of colonization and continuing through to the present, the book covers all the major American religious groups, from Protestants, Jews, and Catholics to Muslims, Hindus, Mormons, Buddhists, and New Age believers. Revised and updated, the book includes expanded treatment of religion during the Great Depression, of the religious influences on the civil rights movement, and of utopian groups in the 19th century, and it now covers the role of religion during the 2008 presidential election, observing how completely religion has entered American politics.