Best Sikhism

Most Bible commentaries take us on a one-way trip from the twentieth century to the first century. Walter L. Liefeld (Ph.D. Columbia and Union) is distinguished professor emeritus of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and is the author of The Expositor’s Bible Commentary on Luke, Interpreting the Book of Acts, New Testament Exposition, and the IVP New Testament Commentary on Ephesians.

This definitive guide, fully illustrated with photographs, is an accessible introduction to the ancient practice of Kundalini yoga, with information on poses and positions, diet and lifestyle, breathing and stretching techniques, chanting and meditation exercises, and general guidelines that can help anyone—beginner or advanced—gain the greatest benefit from the practice of yoga. Kundalini Yoga: A Simple Guide to the Yoga of Awareness is an introduction to living your life with more awareness and spirituality, as well as a guide to the principles of this form of yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan, the author's teacher.

God Is Not Great is the ultimate case against religion. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers' weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it mostly hasn't), or that "Eastern" religions are better (nope). Sam Harris' The End of Faith (2005) and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (2006) have questioned the existence of any spiritual being and met with enormous success. Replace religious faith with inquiry, open-mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas, he exhorts. Religious faith, he asserts, is both result and cause of dangerous sexual repression. Believers will be disturbed and may even charge him with blasphemy (he questions not only the virgin birth but the very existence of Jesus), and he may not change many minds, but he offers the open-minded plenty to think about.

Even as Muhammad lay dying, the battle over who would take control of the new Islamic nation had begun, beginning a succession crisis marked by power grabs, assassination, political intrigue, and passionate faith. Pitting the family of his favorite wife, the controversial Aisha, against supporters of his son-in-law, the philosopher-warrior Ali, the struggle would reach its breaking point fifty years later in Iraq, when soldiers of the first Sunni dynasty massacred seventy-two warriors led by Muhammad's grandson Hussein at Karbala. Balancing past and present, she shows how these seventh-century events are as alive in Middle Eastern hearts and minds today as though they had just happened, shaping modern headlines from Iran's Islamic Revolution to the civil war in Iraq. It began with a question asked after a particularly ghastly suicide bombing in Iraq: "How come Muhammad, the prophet of unity who spoke of one people and one God, left behind him this terrible, unending, bloody legacy of division between Sunni and Shia?" The subject was all the more irresistible to me personally since it brings together many of my deepest interests: the interplay of religion and politics, more intricately intertwined in the Middle East than anywhere else in the world; my own experience living in and reporting from the Middle East for Time magazine and other publications; my affinity for narrative nonfiction and for tracing the interplay of past and present; and my original training as a psychologist, which comes into play as I explore the story, the way it has endured, and how it is used today in politics, society, spiritual life, and, too often, war. I could almost imagine that if all this had only been better known in the West, American troops would never have been sent within a hundred miles of Iraqi holy cities like Najaf and Karbala, which figure in it so largely, and that we would never have tried to intervene in an argument fueled by such a volatile blend of emotion, religion, and politics. In the end, I will be happy if readers simply turn over the last page and breathe out the words I found myself saying again and again as my research deepened, and that seem to me an entirely appropriate response to a story of this power: "Oh my God..." --Lesley Hazleton.

For 12 months, Barnabas and Anabel traveled around the world, meeting children and talking to them about the celebrations and festivals they enjoy. Grade 2-6?A rich, multicultural look at holidays around the world.

In this book, Jason Ānanda Josephson reveals how Japanese officials invented religion in Japan and traces the sweeping intellectual, legal, and cultural changes that followed. Josephson argues that the invention of religion in Japan was a politically charged, boundary-drawing exercise that not only extensively reclassified the inherited materials of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shinto to lasting effect, but also reshaped, in subtle but significant ways, our own formulation of the concept of religion today. " The. Invention of Religion in Japan is truly revolutionary. “Jason ­Ananda Josephson astutely analyzes how Japanese definitions of religion sought to contain Christian missionary agendas and to position Japan advantageously vis-à-vis Western nations while at the same time radically reconfiguring inherited traditions and articulating new ideological norms for Japanese citizens. This study is illuminating reading for anyone interested, not only in modern Japan, but in the complex interconnections of religion, modernity, and the politics of nation states.” ( Jacqueline Stone, Princeton University ). “Written with remarkable clarity, this book makes an excellent contribution to the study of the interface of traditional Japanese religions and politics. Josephson has used well-documented examples of the creation of various Japanese belief systems in the modern era to suggest a new model for understanding the colonial past of religious studies and to provide new tools and models for grappling with continuing change in religious studies theory. “Jason Ananda Josephson’s book on the ‘invention of religion’ is an informative, well-argued, and stimulating discussion of an important topic that should be fascinating to anyone interested in religion in modern Japan or religion in any historical or cultural context.”-Paul L. Swanson | International Bulletin of Missionary Research. “Jason Josephson’s The Invention of Religion in Japan offers a creative theoretical apparatus that many students of Japanese religion and history will find immediately useful. Josephson upends the familiar Saidian account of Europe’s masterful encounter with the passive ‘Orient,’ showing that Japanese interpreters played active roles in formulating European understandings of the new academic field of ‘Japanese religions.’”-Religious Studies in Japan. “Josephson admirably traces the development of ‘religion’ in Japan and the West, and he constantly reminds of how this invention was inextricably interwoven with international politics and diplomatic relationships. Josephson presents a sophisticated analysis of the invention of religion in Japan by applying theoretically and empirically based explanations that rely on primary source data in multiple languages to contest previous notions of ‘religion’ and assumptions within the academic study of religion. In that respect, The Invention of Religion in Japan can help scholars of religions in Japan and elsewhere continue to refine and shape our understanding of ‘religion’ in modernity.”-Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Readers who are not Japan specialists will find the issues framed by interesting anecdotes and well-chosen historical information.”-Journal of Religion in Japan. “The book is a linguistic and textual tour de force that challenges many preconceptions about the development of studies of religion in Japan as well as about religion as a defined, or definable, category in Japanese contexts. Its thesis, that “religion” as a conceptual category did not exist prior to Western incursions into Meiji Japan and that it thus needed to be invented by the Japanese, is argued convincingly and will make many who have held alternative viewpoints think again. One hopes very much that people outside of religious studies do not look at Josephson’s title and think this is a book solely about religion. “Theoretically sophisticated and intellectually ambitious, Josephson’s book challenges the long-held assumption that religion is a universal component of human experience….Josephson’s work is a skillful exercise in semiotic analysis, drawing on sources in Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Spanish, and Italian, and it illuminates the role of the Japanese as observers of the West, not merely as objects of Western observation….In this way, Josephson uses the transnational approach not only to revise a long-standing problem in Japanese historiography but also to deconstruct hegemonic Western concepts.”-Cross-Currents. “Josephson weaves together a fresh narrative of Japanese nation-building in its relation to religion. [Josephson] does a brilliant job in showing how ‘religion’ was used by state officials, scientists, and other protagonists in late 19th-century Japan as exactly what it is: a free-floating signifier with a strong discursive force that can be of great use for different processes of negotiation and naturalization.”-Inken Prohl | Religion. “The book brilliantly weaves two genealogies of scholarship, making it deeply interesting to students of either one: studies examining the construction of State Shinto in the Meiji period as a nonreligious expression of modern Japanese identity with a generation of critical scholarship on the academic study of religion. [Josephson] has produced an elegant argument that religion (including its co-products, the secular and the superstitious) was not so much imposed on Japan, but rather, in the discursive gap created by Western missionary and diplomatic incursions, invented in Japan by the Japanese to serve the late nineteenth-century modernization project. Josephson sheds much light on how the Western category of religion was adapted, interpreted, and transformed in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. “Josephson’s investigation of the category of religion as it developed in modern Japan is a helpful addition to the field, and, to be honest, I have already begun assigning it in seminars. This book [will be] useful in comparative and theoretical courses on religion and will no doubt appeal to anyone studying Japanese religions and Japanese history.

For more than forty years Dr. Joseph L. Baron, the eminent Jewish scholar, gathered material for this work, mining all the great treasuries of classic Jewish literature. Joseph L. Baron was a reform Rabbi who served at the Temple Emanu-El B'ne Jeshurun in Milwaukee from 1926 to 1960.

In this book, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer has reviewed hundreds of translations of the Tao Te Ching and has written 81 distinct essays on how to apply the ancient wisdom of Lao-tzu to today’s modern world. Some of the chapter titles are “Living with Flexibility,” “Living Without Enemies,” and “Living by Letting Go.” Each of the 81 brief chapters focuses on living the Tao and concludes with a section called “Doing the Tao Now.”. His books Manifest Your Destiny, Wisdom of the Ages, There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem, and the New York Times bestsellers 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace, The Power of Intention, Inspiration, Change Your Thoughts—Change Your Life, Excuses Begone!, Wishes Fulfilled, and I Can See Clearly Now were all featured as National Public Television specials.

The original What Not to Wear from one of fashion's. most enduringly. stylish women ... Madame Genevieve Antoine Dariaux spent most of her life in Paris, and now lives in the south of France.

Especially emphasizing the transformative and karmic significance of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, this book places all astrological techniques in a growth-oriented perspective. Regarding his written works, the Library Journal stated: "The simplicity and clarity of his treatment of complex ideas is remarkable; it makes accessible even to the beginner a wealth of understanding....giving meaningful psychological grounding to astrological interpretation.

Following Zarathustra’s elusive trail back through time and across the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish worlds, Paul Kriwaczek uncovers his legacy at a wedding ceremony in present-day Central Asia, in the Cathar heresy of medieval France, and among the mystery cults of the Roman empire. “Fascinating. One vacillates between wonder at the story told and admiration at the genial intellectual virtuosity of the storyteller. A delight.” — Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. “Vital. Remarkable. Artfully reveals the Zarathustian hinges of Iranian culture. [It] is written with the prescient elegance of a curious traveler and in the hope that ideas that once changed the world may do so again.” — Boston Review.

Lao-tzu's Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, is the classic manual on the art of living, and one of the wonders of the world. Text: English (translation). Original Language: Chinese. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

The first complete translation of a classic Buddhist text on the journey through living and dying Graced with opening words by His Holiness The Dalai Lama, the Penguin Deluxe Edition of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is "immaculately rendered in an English both graceful and precise." Profound and unique, it is one of the great treasures of wisdom in the spiritual heritage of humanity. (Sogyal Rinpoche, author of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying ). a voyage inside the profound imagination of a people, immaculately rendered in an English both graceful and precise. I hope that the profound insights contained in this work will be a source of inspiration and support to many interested people around the world.