Self-help fads come and go but the timeless Jewish practice of mussar, a strategy for ethical and spiritual character refinement, has been helping perceptive and purposeful people live fulfilling and happy lives for generations. After years of teaching mussar classes and workshops and marveling at the dramatic changes in participants' lives, Ruchi Koval provides a roadmap for all, filled with clear explanations and illustrative anecdotes guiding readers through eight practical and powerful steps to a better version of themselves.

A collection of new and startlingly original essays from an acclaimed poet, essayist, and playwright Jay Wright is widely recognized as one of the most important American poets of the past half century. But in recent years, he has also written a series of unconventional essays that he calls “examination papers,” which he defines as “designated inquiries to myself.” In these linked essays, most of which resemble prose-poems, with only a few lines set on each page, Wright explores abiding artistic and philosophical concerns, including language, aesthetic form, knowledge, time, and death. Soul and Substance presents these pieces for the first time. Drawing on everything from African mythology to mathematical axioms, Wright reflects on a wide range of topics: the difficulties of defining and confronting death; the challenge of transcending one’s own consciousness; the nature of rhythm and the structure of space; and the relationship among the self, the body, and the material world. Throughout, the book examines the limits of human knowledge and the implications of our always imperfect understanding. Experimental and original, Soul and Substance is an important addition to the work of a major writer.

Revised to incorporate the changes in opinions and attitudes since its first publication, the second edition of 'Places of the Soul' has brought Christopher Day's classic text into the 21st century. This new edition of the seminal text reminds us that true sustainable design does not simply mean energy efficient building. Sustainable buildings must provide for the 'soul'. For Christopher Day architecture is not just about a building's appearance, but how the building is experienced. 'Places of the Soul' presents buildings as environment, intrinsic to their surroundings, and offers design principles that will open the eyes of the architecture student and professional alike, presenting ideas quite different to the orthodoxy of modern architectural education. Christopher Day's experience as an architect, self-builder, professor and sculptor have all added to the development of his ideas that encompass issues of economic and social sustainability, commercial pressures and consensus design. This book presents these ideas and outlines universal principles that will be of interest and value to architects, builders, planners and developers alike.

Rooted in the metaphysics of bygone times, the notion of soul in our Western tradition is packed with associations and meanings that are incompatible with the anthropological and naturalistic thinking that prevails in modernity. Whereas treatises of old conceived of the soul as an infinite, immaterial substance which was the ground of man’s hope for eternal salvation, modern psychology has for the most part discarded the concept in favor of more tangible touchstones such as the emotions, desires, and attachments which characterize man as a finite, bodily-existing positive fact. An exception to this trend has been the analytical psychology of C. G. Jung. Against the positivistic spirit of his times, Jung insisted upon a "‘psychology with soul,’ that is, a psychology based upon the hypothesis of an autonomous mind." In this volume, Wolfgang Giegerich once again takes up the Jungian commitment to a psychology with soul. Agreeing with Jung that the soul concept is indispensable for a truly psychological psychology, he supplements and re-orients the Jungian approach to both this concept and the phenomenology of the soul by means of a whole series of nuanced discussions that are as rigorous as they are thoroughgoing. The result is nothing short of a tour de force. Tarrying with the negative, Giegerich’s particular contribution resides in his showing the movement against the soul to be the soul’s own doing. In animus moments of itself, consciousness in the form of philosophy and Enlightenment reason turned upon itself as religion and metaphysics. Far from abolishing the soul, however, these incisive negations were themselves negated. As if dancing upon its own demise, the soul came home to itself, not as an invisible metaphysical substance, but more invisibly still as the logically negative evaporation of that substance into the form of subject, or even better said, into psychology.

For over two centuries, scientists have denied or ignored the possiblity of an afterlife. Now, however, research has taken an unexpected turn, finding compelling evidence of the existence of life after death and the human soul. This beautifully written, well documented book compares ancient Jewish teachings, and contemporary research on the subject of the afterlife. It is a fascinating, valuable, and insightful contribution to Jewish literature.