Despite my personal beliefs of spiritual openness and freedom, I never forget my native religious language of Christianity. I don’t let that limit me spiritually, but I also don’t exclude it from my worldview. Since I read many books about spirituality from many different faiths and traditions, I constantly have to check my natural Christian leanings and embrace many other [...]

Religion evolution seems to be the latest trend in the world of intellectuals, seculars, and atheists trying to model religion into something logical. These new trendsetters, offering a softer, yet still intellectual examination of religion’s roots and evolution over the ages, seem to have replaced the angry atheists led by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Though their exact motives vary, [...]

Deepak Chopra’s 2008 book The Third Jesus is an attempt to understand three distinct manifestations of this elusive person: the historical Jesus, the theological Jesus created by the church, & the spiritual Jesus available to those that can achieve what Chopra calls a God-consciousness. Using the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (trust me, it matters) and Gnostic texts, [...]

Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God is an ambitious endeavor indeed. I’ll admit a certain level of skepticism at the onset, as anyone who claims to break down over five thousand years of God’s evolution in just over five hundred pages will have to be quite the scholar. Wright certainly has the credentials to do such work, as he is [...]

A few months ago, I had a dream that led me to start thinking about the religious, spiritual, and philosophical significance regarding the mathematical concept of infinity. Combining this with my never-ending interest in Russian and Soviet history and culture, Naming Infinity would seem like a perfect book for me. Just released in March, Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor’s book [...]

Thich Nhat Hanh’s 2003 book No Death, No Fear is another in a long series of spiritual classics by the Buddhist monk. I have nothing negative to say about this book and can only offer four passages that show the essence of this book. There’s a very funny story in the sutras. A woman left a saucepan of milk with [...]

In 2008, I listened to Krista Tippett interview Eckhart Tolle for her radio show Speaking of Faith and became interested in his ideas about living in the present reality. Tolle has also been involved with Oprah Winfrey in both a webinar and a radio show that discussed this very book, A New Earth. The authors, psychologists, physicians, and other guests [...]

Krista Tippett wrote Speaking of Faith in 2007 and around the same time, I discovered her public radio show of the same name. I often listen to the radio show on my iPod, so her voice is very close to my ear. This made reading this book somewhat challenging because I had a difficult time stopping her from narrating it [...]

The Power of Myth is a series of conversations between journalist Bill Moyers and mythologist Joseph Campbell that took place in 1985 and 1986. In this remarkable collection, Moyers managed to ask Campbell the right mix of questions to help show Campbell’s rich framework of mythology and spirituality. Campbell, who died in 1987 at the age of 83, was a [...]

The First and Last Freedom is a 1954 book by philosopher and spiritual thinker Jiddu Krishnamurti. Writer Aldous Huxley wrote the forward and described well what this complex book is all about: “The fundamental theme is developed by Krishnamurti in passage after passage. ‘There is hope in men, not in society, not in systems, organized religious systems, but in you [...]