New Books in Spiritual Practice and Mindfulness
217 episodes - English - Latest episode: 23 days ago - ★★★★ - 4 ratingsInterviews with Spiritual Practitioners about their New Books
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Episodes
Maria Heim, “The Forerunner of All Things: Buddhaghosa on Mind, Intention and Agency” (Oxford UP, 2013)
November 08, 2015 18:46 - 59 minutesBuddhaghosa, a fifth-century Pali Buddhist scholar or group of scholars, is the most influential commentator in Theravada Buddhist tradition, who has in many respects created the set of ideas we now associate with Theravada Buddhism today. Maria Heim‘s new The Forerunner of All Things (Oxford University Press, 2013) is one of the few books to explore Buddhaghosa’s extremely wide corpus of work on a whole. She focuses on the theme of intention (cetana) to explore how Buddhaghosa articulates a ...
Rick Strassman, “DMT and the Soul of Prophecy” (Park Street Press, 2014)
March 15, 2015 06:01 - 1 hourDMT and the Soul of Prophecy:A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (Park Street Press, 2014) asks a number of provocative questions about drugs, consciousness, prophecy, and the Hebrew Bible–with attention to how a particular chemical can help us understand mystical experience. DMT (dimethyltryptamine) is a molecule endogenous to several mammals including humans, as well as the active psychedelic ingredient in a number of plant species around the world–most notably in an A...
Evan Thompson, “Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy” (Columbia UP, 2014)
February 15, 2015 06:00 - 1 hourThe quest for an explanation of consciousness is currently dominated by scientific efforts to find the neural correlates of conscious states, on the assumption that these states are dependent on the brain. A very different way of exploring consciousness is undertaken within various Indian religious traditions, in which subtle states of consciousness and transitions between such states can be revealed through meditation. In Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Medit...
Mark Epstein, “The Trauma of Everyday Life” (Penguin Press, 2013)
October 13, 2014 06:00 - 53 minutesBeing human, much of our energy goes into resisting the basic mess of life, but messy it is nonetheless. The trick (as psychoanalysts know) is to embrace it all anyway. “Trauma is an indivisible part of human existence. It takes many forms but spares no one,” so writes psychiatrist and practicing Buddhist Dr. Mark Epstein. Epstein illustrates this truth by offering a psychoanalytic reading of the life of the Buddha in his latest work, The Trauma of Everyday Life (Penguin Press, 2013). It’s a...
Kathleen D. Singh, “The Grace in Dying: A Message of Hope, Comfort and Spiritual Transformation” (HarperOne, 2013)
April 03, 2014 18:07 - 48 minutesIn this brilliantly conceived and beautifully written book, Kathleen Dowling Singh illuminates the profound psychological and spiritual transformations experiences by the dying as the natural process of death reconnects them with the source of their being. Examining the end of life in the light of current psychological understanding, religious wisdom, and compassionate medical science, The Grace of Dying offers a fresh, deeply comforting message of hope and courage as we contemplate the mean...
Barbara Bonner, “Inspiring Generosity” (Wisdom Publications, 2014)
February 27, 2014 07:50 - 45 minutes“You can measure the depth of people’s awakening by how they serve others.” This quotation by Kobo Daishi, the ninth-century Japanese Buddhist monk, is only one of many observations that fill this small volume with words of wisdom and compassion. In her book Inspiring Generosity (Wisdom Publications, 2014), philanthropy expert Barbara Bonner explores the stories of fourteen individuals and how they were inspired to start their personal journey to give and to dedicate their lives to the act o...
Judith Orloff, “The Ecstasy Of Surrender: 12 Surprising Ways Letting Go Can Empower Your Life” (Harmony Books, 2014)
January 29, 2014 11:20 - 47 minutesSurrender is a difficult concept for many people in Western societies, where everything seems to evolve around the desire for control, predictability and power. In our age of anxiety, certainty and control has become the number one tool to help us take charge of our lives so we can pursue the elusive goal of being happy. In her book The Ecstasy of Surrender: 12 Surprising Ways Letting Go Can Empower Your Life (Harmony Books, 2014), psychiatrist and author Judith Orloff points to all the ways ...
Lawrence J. Friedman, “The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet” (Columbia UP, 2013)
January 02, 2014 12:03 - 52 minutesErich Fromm, one of the most widely known psychoanalysts of the previous century, was involved in the exploration of spirituality throughout his life. His landmark book The Art of Loving, which sold more than six million copies worldwide, is seen as a popular handbook on how to relate to others and how to overcome the narcissism ingrained in every human being. In his book The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (Columbia University Press, 2013), Harvard professor Lawrence J. Friedman explore...
Robert K. C. Forman, “Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be” (Changemakers Books, 2011)
December 10, 2013 18:52 - 1 hourIn these times, when more and more people are looking for spiritual truth and engage in practices like meditation, it’s hard to know what to expect from attaining a lofty goal like Enlightenment. What does Enlightenment look like? What happens when we attain it? What does it mean in terms of our relationships? Our families? Our jobs? In his book Enlightenment Ain’t What It’s Cracked Up To Be (Changemakers Books, 2011), spiritual teacher and religious scholar Robert K. C. Forman explores the ...
R. Jay Wallace, “The View from Here: On Affirmation, Attachment, and the Limits of Regret” (Oxford University Press, 2013)
December 01, 2013 06:00 - 1 hourOur moral lives are shot-through with concerns and even anxieties about the past. Only a lucky few, if anyone at all, can escape nagging and persistent regrets about actions and decisions in our past. But sometimes those very decisions that we now regret are the causal or conceptual antecedents of subsequent outcomes that we now affirm. That is, when we look back on our lives, we often find certain features of our past lamentable, even though without those features something of value in our p...
Paula Huston, “A Season of Mystery: 10 Spiritual Practices for Embracing a Happier Second Half of Life” (Loyola Press, 2012)
June 11, 2013 13:50 - 1 hour“Paula Huston wrote literary fiction for more than twenty years before shifting her focus to spirituality. She is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Daughters of Song (Random House, 1995), which the Baltimore Sun called “far and away the best book yet” about life in the classical piano world at Peabody Conservatory. Nominated for the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco’s Gold Medal for Best First Novel, it was also chosen by the Christian Science Monitor for its first “Novelist’s Deb...
Jeff Wilson, “Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South” (UNC Press, 2012)
July 20, 2012 20:33 - 1 hourAmericanists have long employed a trope of regionalism to better understand American religions, beliefs, and practices. As many of us know, either by academic study or, more often, personal experience, the United States feels different in New England as compared to the Midwest, the West Coast, or the Deep South. Regional variations on culture play an important role in shaping our identities and informing our religious practices. Scholars of American Buddhism, however, have been slow to recog...
Raelynn Maloney, “Waking Up: A Parent’s Guide to Mindful Awareness and Connection” (Companion Press, 2011)
March 12, 2012 14:10 - 41 minutesParenting books touting new philosophies are widely available. Raelynn Maloney’s book, Waking Up: A Parent’s Guide to Mindful Awareness and Connection (Companion Press, 2011) is not that kind of book. Rather, her message to parents is simple. Using mindfulness is not meant to replace existing parenting philosophies. It is meant to augment what parents are currently doing. Dr. Maloney first encourages and helps parents understand problematic behavior before guiding them through daily activitie...
Eric Weiner, “Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine” (Twelve, 2012)
February 15, 2012 14:24 - 38 minutesIn his new book, Man Seeks God: My Flirtations with the Divine (Twelve, 2011), Eric Weiner, former correspondent for both NPR and the New York Times, confronts his spiritual side after a medical emergency takes him too close to death. Weiner’s quest to understand faith carries him across the globe, from Las Vegas, where he gets to know a few Raelians a little more closely than he’d like, to Turkey, where he practices whirling with Sufi dervishes. In our interview, we talked about whether his...
Patricia Campbell, “Knowing Body, Moving Mind: Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers” (Oxford UP, 2011)
November 03, 2011 16:29 - 50 minutesThere is a lot of ritual involved in Buddhist practice. As more and more North Americans are discovering Buddhism, they are engaging in more and more Buddhist ritual, despite a general aversion many North Americans have to ritualized behavior. Dr. Patricia Campbell‘s new book, Knowing Body, Moving Mind: Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers (Oxford University Press, 2011), presents an ethnographic survey of two Toronto-based meditation centers and explores the ways in which Buddhis...
Charles Prebish, “An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer” (Sumeru Press, 2011)
October 05, 2011 14:30 - 1 hourCharles Prebish is among the most prominent scholars of American Buddhism. He has been a pioneer in studying the forms that Buddhist tradition has taken in the United States. Now retired, he has written this unusual new book, An American Buddhist Life: Memoirs of a Modern Dharma Pioneer (Sumeru Press, 2011). The book tells the story of Prebish’s role in bringing the field of American Buddhism to prominence. The difficulties he faced in establishing American Buddhism as a legitimate field of s...
David McMahan, “The Making of Buddhist Modernism” (Oxford UP, 2008)
September 02, 2011 18:30 - 58 minutesFor many Asian and Western Buddhists today, Buddhism means meditation and an embrace of the world’s interdependence. But that’s not what it meant to Buddhists in the past; most of them never meditated and often saw interdependence (or dependent origination) as something fearful to be escaped. Many scholars, especially recently, have told this story of the transition from pre-modern to modern Buddhism, but often with no other purpose than to dismiss modern Buddhism as inauthentic, a departure ...