Over the last 160 years, a great dilemma has been hatching out of Western spiritual consciousness. In our modern existence, we have lost faith in the traditional routes by which human beings have come to experience the Divine, and an acceptance of oneself as having a place in the order of the universe. In Spiritual Atheism, Steve Antinoff argues that the dilemma burning within the West has been given its most fundamental expression by Kirilov in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed "God is necessary, and so must exist . . . Yet I know that he doesn't exist, and can't exist . . . But don't you...

This book is written for those inspired by the musical and movie versions of Les Misérables who have not yet tackled Victor Hugo’s 1200-page masterpiece. The novel is pervaded by two central conflicts. The first is the conflict between love and justice. Love is championed by the bishop and, later, by Valjean. Justice is the supreme god of the fanatical Police Inspector Javert. The second is the conflict between love and egotism. Found within the heart of Jean Valjean himself, it is barely discernable in the Jean Valjean of the musical; but without it, the central character of Hugos novel...

Dogen, a Zen master of early medieval Japan, wrote poems that have fascinated readers for centuries. In this volume, acclaimed poet Stephen Berg adapts and refashions more than sixty of them.

Four decades ago -- aged twenty -- the author experienced what he calls a "negative satori," a fundamental and irrefutable realization not of enlightenment, but of himself as a predicament only enlightenment could resolve. This, shaped by the hammer blows of a singular American professor, Richard DeMartino, brought him to Zen, and to Japan. Yet over time, of far greater import than his bungling efforts were the wonderful occupants of the Zen world he encountered: Toyoshima-san, the meditation Prometheus whose superhuman efforts astounded and inspired all while he remained impaled on the...