‘Earth: Our Original Monastery’ by Christine Valters Paintner
Sorin Books, 2020 ISBN 978-1-932057-20-1 Reviewed [...]
Sorin Books, 2020 ISBN 978-1-932057-20-1 Reviewed [...]
Bloomsbury, 2014 ISBN: 978-1472924018 Reviewed by Brendan James ______________________________________________________________________________________________ [...]
riverrun, 2019 ISBN: 978-1787478657 Reviewed by Ian Mowll __________________________________________________________________ What would [...]
iUniverse, 2020 ISBN: 978-1532093418 Reviewed by Ian Mowll [...]
Shambhala, 2020 ISBN: 978-1611807950 Reviewed by Marian Van [...]
Changemakers Books, 2020 ISBN: 978-1-78904-418-8 Reviewed by Marian Van [...]
Eddison Books Ltd., 2019 ISBN: 9781859064474 Reviewed by Alan Whear [...]
North Atlantic Books, 2019 ISBN: 978-1623173135 Reviewed by Emma Farrell [...]
Coronet, 2019. ISBN:9781473653436 Reviewed by Marian McCain __________________________________________________________________ What [...]
Sounds True, 2018 ISBN: 978-1683640424 Reviewed by [...]
Routledge Focus. 2018 ISBN: 978-1-138-55182-4 Reviewed [...]
Permanent Publications, 2018 ISBN: 978-1856233156 Reviewed by Trevor Sharman ___________________________________________________________ [...]
Permanent Publications (2019) ISBN 978-1856233262 Reviewed by Piers Warren ____________________________________________________________________ [...]
New World Library, 2018 ISBN: 978-1-60868-564-6 Reviewed by Marian [...]
North Atlantic Books, 2018 ISBN: 9781623170479 Reviewed by Marian [...]
Allen Lane, 2018 ISBN: 978-0241254684 Reviewed by Ian Mowll [...]
William Collins (2017) ISBN: 978-0008226299 Reviewed by Ian Mowll [...]
Christian Alternative (a John Hunt Publishing imprint) 2017 [...]
Practical Inspiration Publishing, 2018 ISBN: 978-1788600453 Reviewed [...]
Columbia University Press ISBN: 978-0231176989 Reviewed by [...]
Beyond Human Stories, 2018 ISBN 978-1979726252 Reviewed by Trevor [...]
GreenSpirit Book Series, Title No. 8 CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, [...]
GreenSpirit Book Series, Title No. 9 CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, [...]
North Atlantic Books, 2018 ISBN: 978–1623172480 Reviewed by Ian Mowll [...]
With a Foreword by Larry Dossey North Atlantic Books [...]
Coronet, 2017 ISBN: 9781473630109 Reviewed by Marian Van [...]
Paul Francis, 2017 ISBN:9780995758612 Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk [...]
Chelsea Green, 2017 ISBN: 97811603587464 Reviewed by Marian [...]
Moon Books, 2017 ISBN 978-1785355738 Reviewed by Piers Warren _____________________________________________________________ [...]
This book is about integrating spiritual values and techniques into everyday life and making intuitive connections with the place where ancient wisdom affects our daily life.
Mary Reynolds is a talented Irishwoman with ancient magic in her blood and a sublime sense of beauty, both of which she brings to her work as a garden designer. Her aim is to create gardens that are very natural places, gardens in which the energy flows freely and abundantly and which also evoke in us a sense of homecoming, in that they reconnect us with the pulse of Nature and remind us that we, too, are part of the natural world.
Two vivid accounts of sailing pilgrimages the author recently undertook in his small yacht, Coral, from the southern coast of England to Ireland, and to the far north of Scotland. Yet his book is not simply a day-to-day account of things that happened or had to be done in order for him to reach various historical sacred places of interest. Its richness lies in his skill of including additional material, writers, and sharing thoughts and knowledge he has about Nature, and our interactions and relationships with her.
In this beautifully written book, Sara Maitland sets out on a series of walks through ancient forest and woodland in Britain seeking the symbiosis between forests and fairy stories. She expresses a deep concern that the future of these two sources of healthy life experience is endangered.
This book is primarily about Thomas Merton (31 January 1915 – 10 December 1968), a Trappist monk in the USA. But it is also about Creation Spirituality (as articulated by Matthew Fox) and Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic of the Middle Ages who influenced both Thomas Merton and Matthew Fox. It is a good way not only to understand Thomas Merton but also to see the strands of Creation Spirituality in Eckhart, Merton and Fox.
This ebook on Deep Green Living is a collection of articles written by fourteen different authors and is in four parts. The first is about feeling our sense of place on the Earth, the second looks at our lifestyles, the third is about wildness and the final part discusses our relationship with the natural world. The intention of the ebook is to help us to find our place in the world and to inspire us to live in good relationship with the Earth and all beings.
This is Matthew Fox’s autobiography – revised and updated in 2015. It describes his life’s journey; born in Wisconsin, USA and being bought up in a Catholic family, through his time in the Dominican Order, his blossoming as a theologian and teacher, his dismissal from the Dominican Order and how he joined the Episcopalian Church (the Anglican Church in the USA).
This author is an ecopsychologist with a counselling practice, and her specialty, which she describes as 'bioregional totemism' takes a much wider and more holistic approach than many of her colleagues. She calls it a self-created, spirit-centred neoshamanic path. It begins with a reminder that everything we touch came in some way from a natural source and that: …even living in the middle of the city, I spend every moment immersed in nature. "
William defines ritual as activities that bring about a change: “symbolic actions through which we can give our soul or psyche an important message”. He says that from ritual we can receive clear and potent messages; have a sense of belonging, but most importantly receive the gift of connection with Nature, with the other-than-human. Ritual can put us in direct connection with the mysterious, the numinous, the Other.
This book on the Green Man—that ubiquitous but endlessly varied symbol that takes the form of a human face sprouting greenery—is impossible to pigeonhole and its message is hard to pin down in a few sentences. But the Green Man is unpindownable. Not just because his origins are so ancient and so complex but because he represents something that is still alive and real and omnipresent. Despite humankind’s efforts to ‘conquer’, ‘tame’ and ‘manage’ Nature, Nature resigns supreme—because of course we are Nature, subsumed within it, just like everything else in the living world. So what this author has produced, as a result of her journeying around the UK and other parts of Europe in search of the Green Man – and her amusing but often rambly and confusing meanderings through history, literature, folklore, religion, sex, magick, shamanism, metaphysics and endless speculative cogitation – is a book in which the Green Man is never pinned down, yet ever present.
The decision to have – or not to have—children, says this author, is "a private decision with global consequences." Her book is intended to help those who are involved in making the decision whether or not to remain childless and includes all genders, creeds, cultures and the different reasons for considering this. Her greatest inspiration came from Stephanie Mills’ graduation speech, during the time when the population explosion began to cause concern. Stephanie said, "I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is have no children at all."
A panoramic view of Earth-centred teachings in different spiritual and religious traditions. 10 authors cover 10 different traditions: Christianity, Judaism, Paganism, Daoism, Hinduism, Indigenous traditions, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism and Creation Spirituality (Creation Spirituality as articulated by Matthew Fox, which helped to lay the foundations for GreenSpirit). The territory covered is so vast that each chapter is often more of a personal reflection from someone either directly involved with the tradition or who is very knowledgeable about it.
This ebook is about the Universe Story (the story as revealed by science from the Big Bang to the present day) and how it can inspire us in our lives and help to create a better world.
Spiritual activism is about being both ‘spiritually active,’ i.e. inspiring others, as well as being ‘spiritually grounded,’ i.e. being a compassionate activist with protests and practical action. It has ten chapters covering a wide range of territory, each ending with a case study featuring a well-known person who has been involved in spiritual activism such as Julia Butterfly Hill, Gandhi, Muhammad (pbuh) and Desmond Tutu.
The thoughts and emotions that are stirred awake in us when we walk in a desert landscape have a different quality from those engendered by a walk in the depths of a forest. Different again are the ideas and images that come to mind when we marvel at a mountain peak or stand in a high place and look across a valley. And when we gaze out at the ocean or sit on the bank of a fast-flowing river or find ourselves in the middle of a grassy field, the inner scene changes again. In this unusual book, Mary Reynolds Thompson studies these deep connections between the Earth's primary landscapes and what she calls the 'soulscapes' of our inner lives and how this connection can be used for emotional healing and spiritual transformation.
pbk 328 pp North Atlantic Books 2015 ISBN: 978-1583949030 Reviewed [...]
This would be a good book for study in schools because it offers scientific and technical information about ecology, sociology and psychology at a level that is very accessible. The author, a Scottish environmentalist, relates this to the inner life and thence the outward actions of all of us. Essentially, it’s a book about climate change and the human mind-set that has brought it about but continues to deny any responsibility. It also gives us constructive suggestions for a way forward.
Beginning with an evocative quote from the Tao to set the ambience for the material that follows, this work creatively holds many diverse areas in an integral manner covering, with a commanding scholarship, such fields as economics, psychology, cosmology, ecology and spirituality. It also displays a strenuous commitment to issues of social justice combined with a path-breaking reflection on sustainability in a larger evolutionary context, exploring the work of Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme in the context of cosmology.
Most urban spaces and buildings in the West are designed and built with no sensitivity whatsoever to these subtle energy currents. Which is why Jaime Lerner's book is called 'Acupuncture'. It is all about bringing life back into dead spaces and restoring the flow of energy to places where it has been blocked or stifled. Lerner, who was three times mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, and is also an architect and a popular advocate for sustainable and liveable urbanism, describes how some city planners have worked to restore life and dynamism to ailing urban areas.
In recent years, as modern life causes more and more of us to become emotionally disconnected from the Earth upon which all our lives depend, we are realizing that it is not just the land we live in that needs rewilding but our own selves. This means finding ways to break down all the artificial boundaries that we humans have tried to place between ourselves and the rest of Nature. It means recognizing that we are—and always have been and always will be—an intrinsic part of the Earth, cells in the body of a living planet. Furthermore, it means re-learning how to live our daily lives out of that knowing. It means coming back 'down to Earth' in the truest sense of that phrase: consciously re-immersing ourselves in every way possible in the natural world that surrounds is, both without and within. That way lies healing—for ourselves and our planet.
This book was inspired by a weekend gathering of Pagans and Christians in 2014 in which participants were invited to explore their prejudices and preconceptions, learn more about each other, and find common ground in ‘Celebrating Planet Earth’. It is divided into 3 main sections: Addressing our fears and prejudices, Possibilities for cooperation and The role of ritual practice, myth, music and poetry in each tradition and in inter-faith encounter. Each section has a number of chapters written by various participants and speakers who were at the gathering.