I Am Not Perfect is a simple statement of profound truth, the first step toward understanding the human condition, for to deny your essential imperfection is to deny yourself and your own humanity. The spirituality of imperfection, steeped in the rich traditions of the Hebrew prophets and Greek thinkers, Buddhist sages and Christian disciples, is a message as timeless as it is timely. This insightful work draws on the wisdom stories of the ages to provide an extraordinary wellspring of hope and inspiration to anyone thirsting for spiritual growth and guidance in these troubled times....

"Shame & Guilt" explores the differences between these two painful but inevitable experiences. Both guilt and shame involve feeling "bad"-feeling bad about one's actions (or omissions) in the case of guilt; feeling bad about one's self in shame. The deep meaning of the word bad is "unable to fit" unable to fit into some external context in the case of guilt, unable to fit into one's own being in the case of shame.

Human experience offers two different ways of discovering that one does not "fit," of feeling "bad." Each has to do with the boundaries of the human condition. But there are two...

Most of us walk through each day expecting few surprises. If we want to better ourselves or our lives, we map out a path of gradual change, perhaps in counseling or psychotherapy. Psychologists William Miller and Janet C'de Baca were longtime scholars and teachers of traditional approaches to self-improvement when they became intrigued by a different sort of change that was sometimes experienced by people they encountered--something often described as "a bolt from the blue" or "seeing the light." And when they placed a request in a local newspaper for people's stories of unexpected personal...

Ernest Kurtz has been the outstanding thinker of the A.A. tradition's second generation, the one who played a constant leadership role in pushing the movement towards the highest professional standards of history writing and supplied some of its most influential interpretive concepts. His ideas are vitally important for anyone who wishes to understand A.A. history during the period following Bill Wilson's death in 1971.

As a Ph.D. student at Harvard University in the 1970's, he was the first researcher to be granted full access to the archives of Alcoholics Anonymous. The book that...