Practical Spirituality and Human Development Transformations in Religions and Societies

This book explores varieties of spiritual movements and alternative experiments for generation of beauty, dignity and dialogues, in a world where the rise of the religious in politics and the public sphere is often accompanied by violence. It examines how spirituality can contribute to human development, social transformations and planetary realizations, urging us to treat each other, and our planet, with evolutionary care and respect.  Trans-disciplinary and trans-paradigmatic to its very core, this text opens new pathways of practical spirituality and humanistic action for both scholarship and discourse and offers an invaluable companion for scholars across religious studies, cultural studies and development studies.

Practical Spirituality and Human Development: An Introduction and an Invitation.- Part One: Practical Spirituality: Understanding New Modes of Thinking and Transformative Practice.- The Calling of Practical Spirituality.- What It Means To Be Religious?.- Practical Spirituality: Human Beings Evolving into a Higher Level of Communion and Ethical Relating with One Another.- Critical Spirituality: Towards a Revitalized Humanity.- Practices of Nontheistic Spirituality.- The Ashram as a Secular Place: An Understanding of the Human as a Spiritual Place.- There Is No Path—And You Are On It: Searching For The Self in Starting from Zero.- Life Is Story: Tales and Journeys in Practical Spirituality in the Aesthetic Plasma of Story in the Lila.- Creative Nonfiction is Everything: Postmodernism, Groundlessness and the Dual Portrait.- Consciousness and Energy: An Engimatic Concomitance.- Divine Path of Humanity: Co-Creating “In the image of God”.- Part Two: Practical Spirituality and Transformation of Religions and Societies.- Brahman and Karman: The Theory of Institutional Action in The Bhagavadgita.- Practical Spirituality: Judaic and Multi-Faith Practices of Transformations.- Practical Spirituality and the Desert Fathers.- Mysticism, Sufism and Practical Spirituality.- Quaker Process as Practical Spirituality for the Anthropocene Age.- Paganism as Practical Spirituality.- Beyond Self to Society and Sustainability: Lesson in Practical Spirituality From Sikhism.- Practical Spirituality and the Transformation of Political Power: The Great Law of Peace and the Influence of Iroquois Women and Policies on Early U.S. Women Suffragists.- Tolstoy and Practical Spirituality.- Discovering Reality as Old as the Hills Assisted with Gandhi’s Light: Some Notes on Practical Spirituality and Human Development.- Building a Peaceful World and the Calling of Practical Spirituality: Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer.- Falling Together: Practical Spirituality in an Impractical World.- Thomas Berry, A New Cosmology and Practical Spirituality.- Mysticism, Practical Spirituality and Hospitality: Walking and Meditating with Jacques Derrida.