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Spirituality for Our Global Community: Beyond Traditional Religion to a World at Peace | 
 enlarge | Author: Helminiak Daniel
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $15.96
You Save: $3.99 (20%)
New (9) Used (3) from $15.96
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 673965
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 0742559181
Dewey Decimal Number: 204
EAN: 9780742559189
ASIN: 0742559181
Publication Date: March 28, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: New Book. Paperback.
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Product Description
In this ground breaking book, Daniel Helminiak provides a crucial spiritual option for the many who feel the need to go beyond the secular materialism of modern society and the beliefs of traditional religious faith. Helminiak gives us a compelling vision of a global spirituality that downplays beliefs and emphasizes the essential spiritual dynamics of the common human quest for wholeness, goodness, freedom and community.
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| Customer Reviews:
Spirituality for Our Global Community June 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I'd recommend this book especially to those who have read The God Delusion (or a similar "anti religious" book) and who are bent on rejecting anything religious or spiritual. Daniel Helminiak makes a strong case to take a more calibrated approach. Yes, we need to see through the religious delusions and doctrines. But we also ought to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water--the baby is our human spiritual capacity, and it is not the same thing as the bath water of religion and holy books. We are paying a huge price for our relentless materialistic pursuits in a secular society - our isolation and loneliness. I agree with Daniel that Pluralistic tolerance is a flimsy screen for protecting community.
Instilling a sense of community and providing personal guidance from cradle to grave used to be the traditional domain and strength of religions. Most of us who don't belong to church or temple no longer know or even remember what it is like to be part of a nurturing community firing on all cylinders. Being a part of a Virtual Internet community is not the same. We need physical closeness, touching, hugging, sharing ...
Daniel grew up in a Christian integrated community and remembers the security and sense of belonging. He invites readers to notice that we do have a spiritual core in our minds. It manifests as flashes of insight, intuition...the "inner voice." Our inner life is very real. Spirituality = personal growth. Why attribute something to other-worldly entities and powers when there is a simpler and better explanation? It is not the existence of super natural beings but the validity of our insights that matters. "Regardless of the truth or falsehood of metaphysical claims, we still have to live out our lives together here on planet Earth." This emphasis is the base for building our new global community.
The extraordinary part about this book is its simple, rational language. It works even for us jaded types.
Spirituality for Our Global Community June 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is tremendously valuable. It is a powerful synthesis of many of the ideas Helminiak has shared before, but it goes well beyond the limits of the more focused work on theology, psychology and meditation that have been the subjects of his previous writings. The most important thing about this book is that it does indeed provide a reason to hope that if we can indeed begin to develop the built-in spiritual potential that comes with being human, we might indeed be able to go beyond the divisive and destructive effects of fanatical and fundamentalist religions that threaten our world.
Spirituality for Our Global Community April 3, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Review of Spirituality for a Global Community by Daniel Helminiak
Years ago, I abandoned the destructive criticism that I had learned in graduate school and began appraisal of any work by asking, what has the author turned me onto that I had previously not entertained. Helminiak has given me a new appreciation for the meaning of spirituality and its possible contribution to developing community and peace in our pluralistic world. That may seem quixotic to some readers. Helminiak is only like Don Quixote in that he longs for community as he had experienced it in the past. Instead of turning backward, as Quixote did, he finds direction in the contemporary interpretation of spirituality by Bernard Lonergan. That spirituality grows out of the ability of human beings to transcend themselves. By that, Helminiak and Lonergan mean that we become static by being controlled by biological make-up and restraints built into our psyche. While these factors are important for development, they are also limiting, and we become fully human by transcending them.
Helminiak contends that both traditional religious faith and secular materialistic ideology contribute to the lack of community and spiritual fulfillment in our pluralistic postmodern world. He contends that spirituality arises out of human being in the world. Since all humans share it, it can lay a foundation for community, unlike religions with their doctrinal and metaphysical differences or social systems that are directed toward conflicting ends. He confirms that his approach to spirituality is merely one approach and requests that he be given an open hearing. Those who accept his challenge will find themselves richly rewarded.
Before I read this book, I had read some of Helminiak's articles and was delighted to find someone working on the same issue I had been pursuing for years. Like him, I had been seeking a spirituality that speaks to life in the secular world where most of us live most of the time. Even though we share a common quest and similarities in the way we approach spirituality in the world, I found myself challenging some of his affirmations. For instance, his contention that Lonergan's four-part structure of the human spirit is adequate for all spirituality. However, when I became fully open to Helminiak's interpretation of spirituality, I found myself transcending my previous interpretation of spirituality and began to see promising new directions for understanding and pursing spirituality in the world. That's what I call a good read!
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