The idea of maintaining, continuing, and enhancing our relationships with those who have died was a fundamental part of Rudolf Steiner's work. This volume collects a rich harvest of Steiner's thoughts on this subject gathered over many years. Steiner speaks from his own experiences, providing some of the meditation practices and verses that worked for him. We learn of the value of reading to the dead; of using verbs (rather than nouns) when talking with them; of the importance of the sacred moments while falling asleep and awaking for asking questions and receiving answers; of the way our memories of the dead are like "art" to them; and of key moods we must develop -- community with the world, gratitude, confidence in the current of life.

‘Development in the science of the spirit will always … involve what we may call developing the inner meaning and inner configuration of our language.’ – Rudolf Steiner Our present-day language cannot easily convey spiritual concepts. Rudolf Steiner’s search for the words and style to bring to expression a contemporary spiritual worldview epitomises this. In seven organically developing chapters, this little book presents Martina Maria Sam’s long-standing research into this subject. As a writer, editor and lecturer she observed the increasing difficulty that many people – particularly those with an academic training – have with Steiner’s style. However, this style was something that Rudolf Steiner developed very deliberately. As she states: ‘What was most important for me in this was to point out Rudolf Steiner’s intentions in his specific and often original linguistic forms and, consequently, to create the introductory basis for a deeper understanding.’ Gaining such understanding, she says, can in turn enable us to develop insight into the spirit. Sam begins by quoting some of Steiner’s contemporaries, who criticized his ‘grating’ style. She describes why he had to create new forms of expression and examines the specific character of his lectures. She considers two comprehensive stylistic principles that permeate Steiner’s entire body of work, and his special handling of the pictorial element in language. Close attention is paid to Rudolf Steiner’s construction of meditative verses and mantras, and the development of an artistic, linguistically-creative element that will only be possible in the future.

Many will be familiar with the notion that a person at the point of death sees their life flash before them. Rudolf Steiner describes that when the spiritual bodies separate from the physical body, the etheric body of the dying person is revealed, giving a panoramic overview of their earthly life. This etheric body contains everything we have experienced in our consciousness and kept in memory. The etheric not only generates and sustains all life, but encompasses the life forces out of which we shape our existence. Although the revelation of the life tableau belongs to the early period after death, it can also emerge as a result of meditation. Rudolf Steiner speaks of this – through the first level of spiritual experience known as ‘imagination’ – as a conscious self-perception of the soul, taking place in the world of images. Here we are confronted with the harrowing knowledge of our doppelgänger – but we also experience the cosmic forces of childhood that are present in all our life processes. These same forces are described in psychology as the ‘inner child’. In this highly-original anthology of Steiner’s work we are led to a therapeutic, meditative approach that – through working with the imaginative life tableau – can strengthen and heal body, soul and spirit. Chapters include: ‘Experiencing the Inner Child as the Starting Point for a New Philosophy’; ‘Experiencing Life before Birth’; ‘Pain and Sadness When Reliving the Life Tableau’; ‘Intensive Backward Thinking’; ‘Feelings of Happiness When Experiencing the Life Tableau’; ‘Re-experiencing the Inner Child’; ‘Through the Forces of Childhood to the Higher Self and the Christ Experience’.

Theosophy is a key work for anyone seeking a solid grounding in spiritual reality as described by Rudolf Steiner. The book is organized in four parts. First, Steiner builds up a comprehensive understanding of human nature, beginning with the physical bodily nature and moving up through the soul nature to our spiritual being: the I and the higher spiritual aspects of our being.This then leads to the experience of the human being as a sevenfold interpenetrated being of body, soul, and spirit. In the next section Steiner gives an extraordinary overview of the laws of reincarnation and the workings of karma as we pass from one life to the next. This prepares us for the third section where Steiner shows the different ways in which we live, during this life on earth and after death, in the three worlds of body, soul, and spirit, as well as the ways in which these worlds in turn live into us.Finally, a succinct description is given of the path of knowledge by which each one of us can begin to understand the marvelous and harmonious complexity of the psycho-spiritual worlds in their fullness.

`Be a person of initiative, and take care that the hindrances of your own body, or hindrances that otherwise confront you, do not prevent you from finding the centre of your being, where the source of your initiative lies. Likewise, you will find that all joy and sorrow, all happiness and pain, depend on finding or not finding your own individual initiative. - Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 4 August 1924 Rudolf Steiner urges those who feel the calling of the Archangel Michael to become people of initiative. The anthroposophist should be aware that, `... initiative lies in his karma, and much of what meets him in this life will depend on the extent to which he can become willingly, actively conscious of it.' In the second half of this inspiring lecture, Steiner describes how the being of Ahriman is able to work through the personal intellect of human beings today. As a consequence, we are called upon to be inwardly awake and vigilant at all times.

In The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought, Chris L. Firestone, Nathan A. Jacobs, and thirteen other contributors examine the role of God in the thought of major European philosophers from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The philosophers considered are, by and large, not orthodox theists; they are highly influential freethinkers, emancipated by an age no longer tethered to the authority of church and state. While acknowledging this fact, the contributors are united in arguing that this is only one side of a complex story. To redress the imbalance of attention to secularism among crucial modern thinkers and to consolidate a more theologically informed view of modernity, they focus on the centrality of the sacred (theology and God) in the thought of these philosophers. The essays, each in its own way, argue that the major figures in modernity are theologically astute, bent not on removing God from philosophy but on putting faith and reason on a more sure footing in light of advancements in science and a perceived need to rethink the relationship between God and world. By highlighting and defending the theologically affirmative dimensions of thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, and others, the essayists present a forceful and timely correction of widely accepted interpretations of these philosophers. To ignore or downplay the theological dimensions of the philosophical works they address, they argue, distorts our understanding of modern thought. Contributors: Nicholas Adams, Hubert Bost, Philip Clayton, John Cottingham, Yolanda Estes, Chris L. Firestone, Lee Hardy, Peter C. Hodgson, Nathan A. Jacobs, Jacqueline Marina, A. P. Martinich, Richard A. Muller, Myron B. Penner, Stephen D. Snobelen, Nicholas Wolterstorff.