In Pilgrim Heart: The Inner Journey Home, we see that pilgrimage is not just a literal journey or simply a spiritual metaphor, but rather an inspiring path toward greater self-understanding. Whether sharing the experience of her own pilgrimages to Nepal, Thailand, and the Celtic island of Iona, Scotland, or recounting the stories of others' spiritual journeys, Sarah York reveals to us how the cultural and physical discomforts of travel can lead to profound personal change. Beyond the going forth that pilgrimage demands, there is also the process of returning more at peace and at home with ourselves. To be a pilgrim means to have our hearts open to the struggle of being human and to allow that struggle to change us, no matter where our lives take us. Meet Sarah York! Click here to see if Sarah York site.

Strannik is the Russian word for "pilgrim," one with a vocation-a unique, holy calling. Pilgrimage is more than something you `do.' `Being a pilgrim' consumes all of you. The pilgrim is to "be the Gospel and to preach it with his words and with his being." In Strannik, Catherine shows that pilgrimage is not just something for a few spiritual ascetics with wanderlust. Even less does it resemble the modern tourist-style `pilgrimages' that try to cover as many holy places as possible in the briefest time possible. Rather, the true strannik begins by looking within the self, where God already is. While the author does tell us about external pilgrimages such as she herself experienced as a child in Russia, the pilgrimages she is writing about are principally interior. Pilgrimage comes out of a quest for God. Catherine speaks of the "nostalgia for paradise" which all human beings have experienced since Adam and Eve. Without Christ we cannot complete our journey. "Christ was the pilgrim who pilgrimed from the bosom of the Father to the hearts of men and women."

As Christians, we gain the knowledge of God through catechetical instruction, sermons, and Bible study groups. It is quite another thing to have an intimate and experiential relationship with God and truly know him as we would a friend. Contemporary medical research and the great spiritual traditions concur that we are wired to connect and experience God on our lifes journey, and this connection has a transformative effect on our lives. How do we bridge the gap between belief and the reality or the experience of God? Drawing on insights from the early Christian monks and their contributions to the contemplative prayer tradition, the reader is invited to embark upon a pilgrimage to the heart on his or her personal quest to find God.

Victoria Sweet's new book, SLOW MEDICINE, is on sale now! For readers of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, a medical “page-turner” that traces one doctor’s “remarkable journey to the essence of medicine” (The San Francisco Chronicle). San Francisco’s Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God’s hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves—“anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times” and needed extended medical care—ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years. Laguna Honda, relatively low-tech but human-paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea, of the body as a garden to be tended. God’s Hotel tells their story and the story of the hospital itself, which, as efficiency experts, politicians, and architects descended, determined to turn it into a modern “health care facility,” revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for the body and the soul.

Award-winning Australian journalist Stephanie Dale shares with readers a very long walk she took in 2007 as she took time from her newly minted marriage to join her son Ben for a walkabout journey from Rome to Istanbul, all on foot for Ben; mostly on foot for Dale. It was during this walk that Dale not only traveled the beautiful countrysides of Europe and the Middle East, she also visited the inner landscapes of her mind and marriage. She took what she saw and experienced and put it on paper. The result: My Pilgrim's Heart.

“With his engaging blend of travelogue, conversations with a wise and charismatic spiritual father, and musings on the big questions of life and death, Professor Markides takes us as companions on his journey of discovery. The insights that he communicates with such enthusiasm are timely ones: here at last is a writer who challenges the seeker after mystical understanding and Eastern spirituality to discover Christianity.” —Dr. Elizabeth Theokritoff, independent scholar and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Orthodox Christian Theology In Inner River, Kyriacos Markides—scholar, researcher, author, and pilgrim—takes us on a thrilling quest into the heart of Christian spirituality and mankind’s desire for a transcendent experience of God. From Maine’s rugged shores to a Cypriot monastery to Greece’s remote Mt. Athos and, ultimately, to an Egyptian desert, Markides encounters a diverse cast of characters that allows him to explore the worlds of the natural and the supernatural, of religion and spirit, and of the seen and the unseen. Inner River will appeal to a wide range of readers, from Christians seeking insights into their religion and its various expressions to scholars interested in learning more about the mystical way of life and wisdom that have been preserved in the heart of Orthodox spirituality. Perhaps most important, however, is the bridge it offers contemporary readers to a Christian life that is balanced between the worldly and the spiritual.

A comprehensive, fully illustrated overview of Christian spirituality from Jesus up to the present day. The contemplative tradition in Christianity traces its origins back to Mt. Carmel, the prophet Elijah's mountain-top place of encounter with divine power. In the Gospels, we frequently read that Jesus withdrew to quiet places to pray. These biblical precedents have inspired a tradition of contemplation through the centuries and this remarkable book reveals the life and teachings of the great spiritual teachers and Christian mystics, including St. John, Origen, St. Benedict, Julian of Norwich, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, and modern-day mystics like Thomas Merton, Simone Weil, Etty Hillesum, Bede Griffiths, and John Main. The contributors themselves offer an array of leading spiritual writers, including Laurence Freeman, Esther de Waal, Kallistos Ware, Shirley du Boulay, and many more.