How do contemporary teenagers experience and understand religious, spiritual, gender and sexual diversity? How are their experiences mediated by where they go to school, their faith and their geographic location? Are their outlooks materialist, religious, spiritual, or do they have hybrid identities? Freedoms, Faiths and Futures: Teenage Australians on Religion, Sexuality and Diversity offers powerful insight into how teenagers make sense of the world around them. Drawing on rich data from a major national study, this book creates new ways of understanding the complexity of young people's lives and how school education covering diversity best addresses their world. This book argues that school education focused on worldviews is founded on ways of thinking about young people that do not reflect the complexities of Generation Z's everyday experiences of diversity and their interactions with each other. It argues that certain kinds of education in schools can play a significant role in developing religious literacy, tolerance and positive attitudes to diversity.

Celebrated sex expert and bestselling author Dr. Ruth Westheimer bridges the gap between sex and religion in this provocative exploration of intimacy in the Jewish faith In this light-hearted, lively tour of Jewish sexuality, Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer and Jonathan Mark team up to reveal how the Jewish tradition is much more progressive than popular wisdom might lead one to believe. Applying Dr. Ruth's acclaimed brand of couples therapy to such Biblical relationships as Abraham and Sarah, and Joseph and Potiphar's wife, the authors enlist Biblical lore to explore such topics as surrogacy, incest, and arranged marriages. They offer a clearer understanding of the intertwining relationships between sexuality and spirituality through incisive investigations of the Song of Songs, Ruth, Proverbs, Psalms, and some of the bawdier tales of the Prophets. One chapter provides a provocative new perspective on the Sabbath as a weekly revival, highlighting not only its spiritual nature, but also its marital and sexual aspects. Focusing specifically on Orthodox forms of Judaism and offering Dr. Ruth's singular interpretations, the book answers such questions as: What night of the week is best for making love? How often should couples have sex? Can traditional Jewish notions of sex and sexuality be reconciled with contemporary beliefs? What roles can and do dreams and fantasy play? In Heavenly Sex, America's favorite sex therapist takes readers on a frank and fascinating journey to the heart of Jewish sexuality as she fits twenty-first century sexual mores into an ancient-and lusty-spiritual tradition.

Night of Beginnings is a groundbreaking new haggadah for the Passover seder from acclaimed poet, translator, and liturgist Marcia Falk, beautifully designed and illustrated with original color drawings by the author. Unlike both traditional and new haggadahs, which do not contain a full recounting of the biblical story, Night of Beginnings presents the Exodus narrative in its entirety, providing a direct connection to the ancient origins of the holiday. This retelling highlights the actions of its female characters, including Moshe's sister, Miriam; Pharaoh's daughter, who adopts the baby Moshe; and the midwives Shifrah and Pu'ah, who save the Hebrew male infants. Falk's revolutionary new blessings, in Hebrew and English, replace the traditional, patriarchal seder blessings, and her kavanot-meditative directions for prayer-introduce a genre new to the seder ritual. Poems, psalms, and songs are arranged to give structural coherence to the haggadah. A new commentary raises interpretive questions and invites us to bring personal reflections into the discussion. Like the author's widely acclaimed previous prayer books, The Book of Blessings and The Days Between, Falk's poetic blessings for the seder envision the divine as a Greater Whole of which we are an inseparable part. The inclusive language of Falk's blessings makes room for women to find and use their voices more full-throatedly than they were able to do with the male-centered prayers inherited from the early rabbis. Men, too, will encounter here a spiritually moving and thought-provoking experience.

A mother's biological experience of "birth" overwhelmingly captures every ounce of her physical being and has drawn endless cultural attention as a cataclysmic event. The actual moments of birth are indeed spectacular and amazing - a miraculous event that reflects the Heart of God. But surprisingly this sensorial transaction accounts for perhaps one tenth of what is actually packed into this small window of time. The remaining ninety percent of this phenomenal wonder occurs in a world unseen by our human eyes. There is a supernatural process of radiant creativity in operation that goes back to the beginning of time and forward to the end of time. Birth, the biological moment of transition, merely connects the small tangible piece of the flesh to the bigger pieces of a supernatural journey which is stunning and amazing, because Yahweh God is an absolute genius at doing life. As a believer in Yeshua the author's journey to fulfill her destiny has led her down an exquisite path of discovery into this unseen world. Working as a Midwife for the last 50 years has taught her to live life, not from this small, tangible, temporary world, but from the magnificent spirit world that encompasses it and lasts forever. The true stories in this first book have focused on redeeming the gift of Kairos moments for God's Kingdom, and a tiny bit of how angelic forces help us do that in the midst of a world of darkness. This book is not about birth or midwifery. It is a collection of stories that demonstrate the faithfulness of Yahweh God, the designer of birth, and the author of its supernatural dimensions, who engages intimately with earth to touch our every need. It is His story written through the lives of His people.

You ever wanted love, but didn't know what it was? You ever been hurt by what you thought was love? You ever missed love, because you couldn't recognize it?

"All You Wanted To Know About Love, But Refused To Accept" is a book about love that explains the true meaning of love. It discusses the character traits of love, to enable you to recognize it. This book also explains the main ingredient of love, without which love cannot exist. The information in this book will help you avoid the hurt, the deception, and the heartache that often comes with erroneous concepts about love. This book will enable you to look at love from a new perspective, and hopefully, enjoy it more.

The excitement of the spiritual life is as fulfilling as friendship, as mysterious as the soul, and as infinite as the universe. This book is a jumpstart in the faith for those who have tried religion and not found the spirit, or have tried pleasure and not found joy, or have chased after life and not found deep meaning, or thought God to be imagined and not been awakened.

The book includes chapters on the infinite interior life, expectant faith, mystery traveler, sex in God's creation, beautiful simplicity, storytelling, difficulties connecting with God, religion unfettered, the New Evangelization, with humor throughout. The final chapter, titled "Evolutionary Christogenesis," includes quotes from Teilhard de Chardin.

The author, a Catholic priest, writes unabashedly of straitjacket rituals, institutional stonewalling, and the cynicism of people. Positively, he conveys an enthusiasm in the surge of goodness that is present in this generation. He conveys how you can become a fully rigged ship with sails unfurled in the sea of God's spirit. The divine force has never been absent from nature's scene or from human relational ways. We are called to be faith rebels.

This book investigates how Buddhism gradually integrated itself into the Chinese culture by taking filial piety as a case study because it is an important moral teaching in Confucianism and it has shaped nearly every aspect of Chinese social life. The Chinese criticized Buddhism mainly on ethical grounds as Buddhist clergies left their parents' homes, did not marry, and were without offspring-actions which were completely contrary to the Confucian concept and practice of filial piety that emphasizes family life. Chinese Buddhists responded to these criticisms in six different ways while accepting good teachings from the Chinese philosophy. They also argued and even refuted some emotional charges such as rejecting everything non-Chinese. The elite responded in theoretical argumentation by (1) translations of and references to Buddhist scriptures that taught filial behavior, (2) writing scholarly refutations of the charges of unfilial practices, such as Qisong's Xiaolun (Treatise of Filial Piety), (3) interpreting Buddhist precepts as equal to the Confucian concept of filial piety, and (4) teaching people to pay four kinds of compassions to four groups of people: parents, all sentient beings, kings, and Buddhism. In practice the ordinary Buddhists responded by (1) composing apocryphal scriptures and (2) popularizing stories and parables that teach filial piety, such as the stories of Shanzi and Mulian, by ways of public lectures, painted illustrations on walls and silk, annual celebration of the ghost festival, etc. Thus, Buddhism finally integrated into the Chinese culture and became a distinctive Chinese Buddhism.