For those who carry this book you shall always be protected from smoke, ash, fire and all from harm and evil. For this is the book of knowledge and wisdom. You shall always have a friend indeed. Blessed be love and light

Spiritual attainment has frequently been described as a transformation whereby a human's leaden, dull nature is returned to its golden state. This wonderfully insightful volume introduces some of the metaphors useful for establishing attitudes required for the soul's advancement: trust, confidence, hope, and detachment. It is a reminder that when any substance or entity undergoes dissolution, it must eventually be resolved or re-crystalized in a new, possibly higher and more noble form.

Perhaps inadvertently, historians have often eliminated the religious chapters--those episodes in history during which human insights into transcendence and divinity have shaped human consciousness--from our planet's story. This book tells the story of cosmic history as big historians tell it, beginning with the big bang, and explores the question of God hidden beneath this story. The book pauses on the Axial Age of human history: a moment during the first millennium BCE in which questions of transcendence first simultaneously arose in distinct locations around the world. By exploring this threshold in cosmic history, the author demonstrates the way the arrival of the God question marked a radical new human consciousness, one that ultimately laid the groundwork for the modern age.--

With elegance and clarity, Wolfgang Smith leads the reader, step by step, to the realization that the specifically 'modern' world is based intellectually, not indeed upon scientific facts, but ultimately on nothing more substantial than a syndrome of Promethean myths. And this 'opening' enables him to recover and reaffirm the deep metaphysical insights that have come down to us through the teachings of Christianity: having broken the grip of scientistic presuppositions, the author succeeds in bringing to view universal truths which had long been obscured.

A foremost thinker on science and religion argues that an adequate understanding of cosmic history requires attention to the emergence of interiority, including religious aspiration Over the past two centuries scientific advances have made it clear that the universe is a story still unfolding. In this thought-provoking book, John F. Haught considers the deeper implications of this discovery. He contends that many others who have written books on life and the universe--including Stephen Hawking, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins--have overlooked a crucial aspect of cosmic history: the drama of life's awakening to interiority and religious awareness. Science may illuminate the outside story of the universe, but a full telling of the cosmic story cannot ignore the inside development that interiority represents. Haught addresses two primary questions: what does the arrival of religion tell us about the universe, and what does our understanding of the cosmos as an unfinished drama tell us about religion? The history of religion may be ambiguous and sometimes even barbarous, he asserts, but its role in the story of cosmic emergence and awakening must be taken into account.

In this profound book, William Chittick examines the demise of the Sufi academic tradition, questioning how Islamic thought can be reclaimed from ideology and commercialism.

"The highest honor a philosopher can receive is to be nominated by his peers for inclusion in the series of The Library of Living Philosophers [for which the] latest entry is The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. And the highest honor a theologian can receive is to be invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures in Glasgow, Scotland. Seyyed Hossein Nasr is the only person ever to have received both of these honors.... This valuable book distills the essence of the thought of one of the most important thinkers or our times." Book jacket.