This topic contains 19 replies, has 14 voices, and was last updated by 
David Hayward 1 year, 6 months ago.
-
Posts
-
I’m kind of big on reading books on spirituality and the like, especially since I don’t read the Bible or really any “sacred” text anymore. What have all you guys been reading recently?
I just finished “what we talk about when we talk about God” by Rob Bell and have started reading “the spontaneous fulfillment of desire” by Deepak Chopra.
Oh boy. Some of my recent books about spirituality would freak out many of my church friends.
The two big recent ones were Jesus Through Pagan Eyes by Mark Townsend and Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola and George Barna. The former shows how a lot of pagans think about Jesus when he is shorn of “churchianity” and it is surprisingly accommodating. The latter looks at why church is the way it is and why the descriptions of the first-century church seem so alien by comparison (hint: because it is!).
I have a few things from Erwin McManus, too, which look like they want to upset some deeply-rooted church theory, but I don’t think he starts far enough away from that thinking.
Wade.
AnonymousCurrently, I’m reading two books:
1. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination, by Dr. Jeffrey Raff
I’m almost finished with this one and it’s been absolutely fascinating. The book opens up exploring Jung as a spiritual tradition (which is quite amazing) and explores the contents of his newly famous Red Book as well as the influence Jung expressed from the alchemists and the mystics of the middle ages. Brilliant, brilliant book written by both a Jungian psychotherapist and a graduate of the CG Jung Institute he founded in Zurich. This guy knows his stuff.2. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, by Leonard Shlain
I’m brand new to this one, but it’s already a wonderful read of the anthropological stages of human development and the influence literacy and human language have on the brain, social structures and the way we’ve evolved our process of dealing with images.
AnonymousI am reading a book by Richard Layman called ” Resurrection Dreams”. A total fiction horror novel…
AnonymousI am reading, “The Origins of Political Order” by Francis Fukuyama. I just started it. One of my favorite, “spiritual” books that I like to recommend to anyone is ” Hinds Feet On High Places” by Hannah Hurnard. I know this group is book crazy. I have a five hundred book, book-list now. I am so behind in my reading time.
AnonymousPeter Rollins – The God Idolatry
I’ve begun reading “Evolving Out of Eden” by Robert M Price and Edwin Suomimen. Interesting so far.
AnonymousI just finished reading an excellent book last night called Dying to Be Me by Anita Moorjani.
She shares her story of how she spent her life PLEASING OTHERS, PRETENDING, AND PERFORMING out of FEAR that to truly be herself would disappoint her family and friends. And what did she get for doing all that pretending and performing? Terminal cancer – Lymphoma.
While she was dying, she had a near death experience which completely healed her body of cancer and totally changed how she sees things and lives her life now. Her descriptions of what it was like to be ”in the other realm” were fascinating, and I could not believe the parallels between her struggles and mine – and how many things she said pertains to so many of the things many of us TLSers are going through. I mean, it’s not like any of us are dealing with the fear of being who we are and living our truth, right???
And there were so many great (and even surprising) “nuggets of “truth” she discovered while “in the other realm” too.
It was just one of those “unexpected timely reads” that has left me in awe. So much so, that I am still processing and unable to really articulate yet what I learned from it. But I highly recommend this book! It really spoke to a lot of things we discuss here at TLS.
Not really a “spirituality” book necessarily, and not non-fiction, but I’m reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Dystopian picture of what happens when religion is taken too far. Very good, but disturbing in a “this could actually happen” kind of way.
AnonymousDo textbooks count? I’m in school part time taking a professional writing certificate program. Most of my reading since last fall has been writing-related textbooks.
Other than textbooks, for downtime, I read fiction. Not as much as I used to, I spend too much time on the internet lol.
Loaded into my Kobo e-reader for summer reading is 12th of Never by James Patterson, Love, Anthony, by Lisa Genova, Let’s Pretend this Never Happened by Jenny Lawson and I will be buying “Bold Love” by Dan Allender as well.
Bold Love is the only spiritual-type book on the above ^^ list.
Oh! I just remembered me and a small group of writerly friends were having a series of Neil Gaiman read-a-long months. Last month was Good Omens. This month is American Gods.
And I’m also dipping into several collections of short stories that I bought last weekend at a writers’ conference.
Wade.
I’m reading The Good Man Jesus & the Scoundrel Christ. I like it.It’s not written by a Christian. In this story, Jesus has a twin named Christ. Christ seems to represent the religious mindset. An excerpt from the book- someone asking ‘Christ’about Jesus:
“Do you want to be like Him?”
“More than anything.He does things out of passion, & I do them out of calculation. I can see further than He can; I can see the consequences of things He doesn’t think twice about. But He acts with the whole of Himself at every moment, and I’m always holding something back out of caution, or prudence, or bc I want to watch& record rather than participate.”Right now I’m reading palms and tea leaves. No. Just kidding. Although I did have my palm read once and it really freaked me out. I’m reading Zizek’s “The Sublime Object of Ideology”, which is a slow hard slog for me. But really good.
@admin You mentioned a palm reading: I had a Tarot reading a few months ago at the Mind Body Spirit festival. It was interesting and even had some accuracy. The reader had been a Catholic and was now a clairvoyant, so she really understood where my spiritual journey was likely to take me!
Wade.
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.