Religion

An essential companion to Happiness, Thich Nhat Hanh's bestselling collection of meditation and mindfulness practices!

Thich Nhat Hanh has a unique talent to make the Buddha's teachings accessible and applicable to our daily lives and times. Here, he takes us to the heart of Buddhist wisdom, offering illuminating insights on essential Buddhist sutras:

- Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra
- Diamond Sutra
- Sutra on Full Awareness of Breathing
- Sutra on The Four Establishments of Mindfulness
- Sutra on The Better Way to Catch A Snake
- Sutra on The Better Way to Live Alone
- Sutra on The Eight Realizations of The Great Beings
- Discourse on Happiness
- Teachings on the Middle Way

With a new introduction and updated commentary, Awakening of the Heart is a wonderful gift for anyone looking to deepen their practice and a unique resource for those looking for an introduction to Buddhism.

With more than two million books sold and countless admirers throughout the world, Anthony de Mello is regarded as one of the most influential religious teachers of the past fifty years. Since his death in 1987, widespread recognition of his work's enduring value has continued to grow. In Awakening, de Mello explores "the wisdom that cannot be conveyed in human speech." Through 365 meditations, blending the mystical traditions of both East and West, he creates the lessons of a profound "master" to his "pupil," illustrating our common need for harmony and enlightenment. The daily parables, sometimes cryptic and often witty, are not meant so much to instruct as to awaken the understanding deep within the human heart.

The discipline of backpacking, Lane shows, is a metaphor for a spiritual journey. Just as the wilderness offered revelations to the early Desert Christians, backpacking hones crucial spiritual skills: paying attention, traveling light, practicing silence, and exercising wonder. Lane engages the practice not only with a wide range of spiritual writings--Celtic, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, and Sufi Muslim--but with the fascination of other lovers of the backcountry, from John Muir and Ed Abbey to Bill Plotkin and Cheryl Strayed. In this intimate and down-to-earth narrative, backpacking is shown to be a spiritual practice that allows the discovery of God amidst the beauty and unexpected terrors of nature. Adoration, Lane suggests, is the most appropriate human response to what we cannot explain, but have nonetheless learned to love.

An enchanting narrative for Christians of all denominations, Backpacking with the Saints is an inspiring exploration of how solitude, simplicity, and mindfulness are illuminated and encouraged by the discipline of backcountry wandering, and of how the wilderness itself becomes a way of knowing-an ecology of the soul.

As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. In Bad Religion he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails--and why it threatens to take American society with it.

Writing for an era dominated by recession, gridlock, and fears of American decline, Douthat exposes the spiritual roots of the nation's political and economic crises. He argues that America's problem isn't too much religion, as a growing chorus of atheists have argued; nor is it an intolerant secularism, as many on the Christian right believe. Rather, it's bad religion: the slow-motion collapse of traditional faith and the rise of a variety of pseudo-Christianities that stroke our egos, indulge our follies, and encourage our worst impulses.

These faiths speak from many pulpits--conservative and liberal, political and pop cultural, traditionally religious and fashionably "spiritual"--and many of their preachers claim a Christian warrant. But they are increasingly offering distortions of traditional Christianity--not the real thing. Christianity's place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, Douthat argues, but by heresy: debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption.

In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, he brilliantly charts institutional Christianity's decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith--which acted as a "vital center" and the moral force behind the civil rights movement--through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s to the polarizing debates of the present day. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Barack Obama, Eat Pray Love to Joel Osteen, and Oprah Winfrey to The Da Vinci Code, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel's mantra of "pray and grow rich," a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach, and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country's ability to confront our most pressing challenges and accelerated American decline.

His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital reading for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.

The Baker Illustrated Bible Handbook offers the most up-to-date evangelical biblical scholarship in a format that is readable and easy to understand. This book-by-book guide brings the Bible to life with more than 1,100 full-color pages packed with illustrations, maps, and photos, and 112 in-depth articles on a wide range of topics important to students of the Bible. Readers will discover how each part of the Bible fits into and informs every other part, giving them a cohesive understanding of God's Word.

No reference collection will be complete without this incredible new handbook to the Bible.

In his first book, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, Gregory Boyle introduced us to Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention program in the world. Critics hailed that book as an "astounding literary and spiritual feat" (Publishers Weekly) that is "destined to become a classic of both urban reportage and contemporary spirituality" (Los Angeles Times). Now, after the suc-cessful expansion of Homeboy Industries, Boyle returns with Barking to the Choir to reveal how com-passion is transforming the lives of gang members.

In a nation deeply divided and plagued by poverty and violence, Barking to the Choir offers a snapshot into the challenges and joys of life on the margins. Sergio, arrested at age nine, in a gang by age twelve, and serving time shortly thereafter, now works with the substance-abuse team at Homeboy to help others find sobriety. Jamal, abandoned by his family when he tried to attend school at age seven, gradually finds forgive-ness for his schizophrenic mother. New father Cuco, who never knew his own dad, thinks of a daily adventure on which to take his four-year-old son. These former gang members uplift the soul and reveal how bright life can be when filled with unconditional love and kindness.

This book is guaranteed to shake up our ideas about God and about people with a glimpse at a world defined by more compassion and fewer barriers. Gently and humorously, Barking to the Choir invites us to find kinship with one another and re-convinces us all of our own goodness.