"Beyond Religion" is a stirring call to move beyond religion for the guidance to improve human life on individual, community, and global levels--including a guided meditation practice for cultivating key human values.

Do you describe yourself as spiritual but not religious? Whether young or old, church connected or not, are you spiritually restless for an authentic faith life but do not find conventional religious teachings pertinent to you? This accessible guide to a meaningful spiritual life is a salve for your soul. It reinterprets traditional religious teachings central to the Christian faith - God, Jesus, faith, prayer, morality and more - in ways that connect with people who have outgrown the beliefs and devotional practices that once made sense to them.

This new book has taken many years of spiritual exploration to create. It explores spirituality within various religions, and finds spiritual gems within each religion while discarding what is contrary to universal human spirituality. The book tries to tear out of religion whatever is tearing humanity apart. It extracts ideas and teachings from our various religions that give us the ability to practice the trimmings of simple spirituality free from the trappings of religious dogma. It reviews various approaches to meditation, and finds a simple letting-go meditation practice which opens up our innate spirituality. This method works for everybody, and is free of religious exclusivity. The meditation practice is based on the teachings of the Tao, Zen, and the Hindu Upanishads, and is consistent with Islamic and Christian spirituality. Finally, it teaches and guides us in bringing the spirituality acquired from prayer and meditation into our everyday lives. This insightful and inspiring book is a call to set spirituality free from the dead-weight of religious dogma. It fearlessly exposes the madness of religious fundamentalism and offers instead the loving kindness of genuine spiritual awakening. Bigoted religion is a source of most of the conflicts bedeviling our world today. In this book Raja Bhat offers an exciting alternative: spirituality transcending religion. Timothy Freke, author and co-author of numerous books on religion and spirituality, such as Encyclopedia of Spirituality; The Jesus Mysteries; Jesus And The Lost Goddess; Spiritual Traditions: Essential Teachings To Transform Your Life; The Complete Guide To World Mysticism and many others.

The experiential and transformational teachings brought to each human being by Jesus of Nazareth transcending religious beliefs, creeds, cultures, and time. The essence of the teachings of Jesus called the Anointed One is the awakening of the spiritual depths of human beings in a way that utterly transforms their understanding of themselves and of their relationship with life. Our world desperately needs such a unifying vision and a sense of common ground among people and cultures. It is the mystic first and foremost who reveals the spiritual home that we all share and the wondrous purpose of our presence in the universe. One of the highly respected personalities in the religious world of our time, the Benedictine Monk Bede Griffith, made this radical and prophetic statement late in his life: "If Christianity cannot recover its mystical tradition and teach it, it should just fold up and go out of business." The Anointed One put it another way: "Why do you call Me, Lord, Lord and do not practice what I tell you?" (Luke 6:46)

Beyond the Big Six Religions: Expanding the Boundaries in the Teaching of Religion and Worldviews is a timely addition to the literature surrounding Religious Education teaching in schools. The book explores the desirability and possibility of expanding the breadth of religious and non-religious worldviews within the classroom. Written by an expert in Religious Education and minority religions, this book articulates the importance of the inclusion of minority voices within the classroom, and in wider society.

Death and reincarnation are the two most mysterious of the spiritual mysteries. It is easy to reject the truth behind both of them. After all, when a person dies, they stop breathing. The big question becomes the following: What happens at death? What is its mystery? Does a person cease to exist after their last breath has been taken? Fear of death is what causes us to worship death. We worship death when we put death on a pedestal and pay for expensive funerals, dress the lifeless body in finery, lay the lifeless body in a satin lined casket made of fine wood, lower the casket into the ground, and identify the location with an expensive gravestone. Then we walk away, to wait for the event to happen to us. It is easy to believe that we do not live after death, regardless of all that Holy Script teaches, regardless of all that spiritual teachers have taught since the beginning of time. When we see a loved one take their last breath, we witness a fact. There is no hidden meaning. The loved one is gone. We are left with emptiness and, sometimes, unbearable sorrow. There are those who believe only what they can see. Death is the end of life. No amount of reasoning can convince them otherwise. Reincarnation is the second most mysterious mystery. If we live again, why dont we remember? This book is presented to provide enlightenment regarding these two mysterious mysteries. Knowledge of the most sublime spiritual mysteries exists; and some of the greatest esoteric teachings known to man are presented in this book for the readers enlightenment. Those who have eyes to see let him see.

Deploying a distinctive disaggregative approach to the study of 'religion', this volume shows that spiritual movements with extensive counterfactual beliefs have been much more creative than one might expect. Specifically, Wayne Hudson explores the creativity of six spiritual movements: the Bahá'ís, a Persian movement; Soka Gakkai, a Japanese movement; Ananda Marga and the Brahma Kumaris, two reformed Hindu movements; and two controversial American churches, The Church Universal and Triumphant and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Most of these movements have counterintuitive features that have led Western scholars making Enlightenment assumptions to dismiss them as irrational and/or inconsequential. However, this book reveals that these movements have responded to modernity in ways that are creative and practical, resulting in a wide range of social, educational and cultural initiatives. Building on research surrounding the ways in which spiritual movements engage in cultural productions, this book takes the international research in a new direction by exploring the utopian intentionality such cultural productions reveal.