Do you ever wonder, "Why doesn't God answer my prayers?" Do you wish you could see the evidence that prayer changes lives? Are you tired of playing it safe with your faith? In Dangerous Prayers, New York Times bestselling author Craig Groeschel helps you unlock your greatest potential and tackle your greatest fears by praying stronger, more passionate prayers that lead you into a deeper faith.

Prayer moves the heart of God--but some prayers move Him more than others. He wants more for us than a tepid faith and half-hearted routines at the dinner table. He's called you to a life of courage, not comfort.

This book will show you how to pray the prayers that search your soul, break your habits, and send you to pursue the calling God has for you. But be warned: if you're fine with settling for what's easy, or you're OK with staying on the sidelines, this book isn't for you. You'll be challenged. You'll be tested. You'll be moved to take a long, hard look at your heart.

But you'll be inspired, too.

You'll be inspired to pray boldly. To pray powerfully. To pray with fire. You'll see how you can trade ineffective prayers and lukewarm faith for raw, daring prayers that will push you to new levels of passion and fulfillment. You'll discover the secret to overcome fears of loss, rejection, failure, and the unknown and welcome the blessings God has for you on the other side.

You'll gain the courage it takes to pray dangerous prayers.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama describes how to bring wisdom and compassion into our busy, stressful everyday lives.A beautiful selection of words from His Holiness that will help you to face difficult emotions such as anger in yourself and in others with genuine acceptance and understanding.The only little gift book based on the words of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, this book should have tremendous appeal especially during the holiday season.

In this little volume of collected messages given over a long period of ministry by the author, Watchman Nee shares with us the lessons on prayer that he has learned through the years.

The conversion career, defined as all episodes of participation in religious organizations during a person's life, is a new and systematic approach to conversion and disaffiliation as a dynamic process. It is a tool to analyze the interplay of factors between the individual actor, the religious organization, and the wider social and cultural context.

This book is the first in over a decade to attempt a systematic synthesis of the field of conversion studies, encompassing the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, psychology, history, and theology. Gooren analyzes conversion and disaffiliation in a worldwide comparative framework, using data from North America, Europe, and Latin America.

This book presents truths coming from the highest consciousness. Including methods for purification and for elimination of the present problems on Earth. America has a most significant role to play in the Master Plan. Eastern man is given reassurance and recognition of his direction, in the tradition and spirit of his forefathers. The pitfalls of the western style of living are enumerated.The esotheric and exoteric techniques for self discovery are explained, also why the world is fast heading away from the true direction - that which is spiritual - in order to pursue materialism and capitalism.

Shamanic journeying is the inner art of traveling to the invisible worlds beyond ordinary reality to retrieve information for change in every area of our lives from spirituality and health to work and relationships. With Shamanic Journeying, readers join world-renowned teacher Sandra Ingerman to learn the core teachings of this ancient practice and apply these skills in their own journey. Includes drumming for three shamanic journeys.

This groundbreaking book explores the philosophical writing of four female reformers, identifying how their spiritual representations of the feminine attempted to authorize and empower women.  Championing the benefits of well educated Christian women, Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mary Baker Eddy constructed an idiom through which to represent the spiritual equality of the male and female.  Arleen M. Ingham critically investigates how these writers challenged historical identity formations and highlighted the potential for female influence in the private "and "public sphere. 

Bhakti Yoga explores one of the eight 'limbs' of yoga. In the simplest terms, bhakti yoga is the practice of devotion, which is the essential heart of yoga and of Hinduism in general. In recent times, the term has come to be used in a rather simplistic way to refer to the increasingly popular practice of kirtan, or chanting in a group or at large gatherings. But bhakti yoga is far more complex and ancient than today's growing kirtan audiences are aware, and embraces many strands and practices. Edwin F. Bryant focuses on one famous and important school of bhakti and explores it in depth to show what bhakti is and how it is expressed. And he supplies his own renderings of central texts from that tradition in the form of 'tales and teachings' from an important work called the Bhagavata Purana, or 'The Beautiful Legend of God.' This clarifying work establishes a baseline for understanding, and will be welcomed by all serious students of the spiritual heritage of India.

If you could speak to Jesus, Buddha, Moses, or Muhammad, what would you ask? In Messages from Heaven: What Jesus, Buddha, Moses, and Muhammad Would Say Today, Ryuho Okawa uses his spiritual power to communicate with these four spirits and shares their messages to the people living today. This book offers spiritual wisdom and answers to the questions of the divine--messages of love, faith, miracles, gratitude, forgiveness from Jesus; inquires on humility, kindness, and enlightenment in the ordinary life with the Buddha; the meaning of righteousness, sin, and justice from Moses; and answers to questions about tolerance, faith, spirituality, and wealth from Muhammad. Through his conversations with four of the most influential religious leaders, Okawa explores the universal truths that thread between all faithsand offers insights to conquer our challenges that we face today. With this quest comes spiritual awakening as human souls, which unites each of us through the universal principles of love, wisdom, self-reflection, and progress.

Demystifying Meaningful Coincidences (Synchronicities): The Evolving Self, the Personal Unconscious, and the Creative Process offers an original theory of the nature of meaningful coincidences (synchronicities) and their practical use from a naturalistic (nonsupernatural and non-Jungian) perspective. The findings are the outgrowth of Gibbs A. Williams's forty-year investigation, both as a professional observer of some of his synchronicity prone patients receiving psychoanalytic psychotherapy as well as of his own intimate experience of these intellectually challenging and emotionally powerful occurrences. His naturalistic perspective is in marked contrast to the findings of Jung and his followers, who view these odd events as "channeled" messages from a transcendent realm of spiritual reality. Instead, Williams concludes that meaningful coincidences are the surface manifestations of an individual's unique creative process, accommodating the "best" available resolution of a problem for a person initially feeling "stuck" in a seemingly intractable dilemma. While his analysis robs the magic associated with only reacting to the "numinous uncanny aura" associated with synchronicities, it nevertheless affirms a wondrous appreciation for the creative capacities of each person to order his or her own chaos. Readers are treated to a rich mine of historical data, novel concepts, and theoretical insights drawn from speculative philosophy, depth psychology, and esoteric occult and spiritual traditions, and they are shown how to decode their own synchronicities in order to be able to use their embedded "messages" for increased self-awareness, cohesiveness, and expanding consciousness.

This comparative study graphs the feminist theological trajectory of the religious writings of four eclectic, but similar, women: Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Baker Eddy.

This book explores the life and ideas of the enigmatic twentieth century philosopher, mystic, and teacher of esoteric dances George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, performing a hermeneutic textual analysis of all his writings to illuminate the place of hypnosis in his teaching. Foreword by J. Walter Driscoll.

We, Sharda and Margot, feel very honored to be able to write and edit such a book. Our spiritual journey has led to the passion of bringing together and sharing the thoughts we ourselves have come across in our lives by meeting gurus, swamis, like-minded seekers, managers, teachers, entrepreneurs, academics, students, and by reading books and practicing spiritual techniques. We also have gained much spiritual inspiration from the teachings of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother to whom we are grateful. The thoughts presented in this book already exist in the East and West. Integr- ing them into the way we do business, can help us to regain trust and respect in business even in the current economic crisis. We aim to convince others of our deep belief that spiritual practices and a spiritual orientation help make life more enjoyable and makes us better human beings through helping us to live in line with our karma in every context of life, in our roles as employees, entrepreneurs, managers, leaders, mothers, or fathers, etc.

The historical records and stories of enslaved African women have both creative and life-affirming resistance strategies for how women of the past have dealt with and healed from violence. This book draws on mid-seventeenth to nineteenth-century slave narratives to describe the depths of multi-dimensional oppression and violence in the lives of enslaved African women. Harrison investigates pre-colonial West and West Central African women's lives prior to European arrival in order to recover those African-derived aesthetic forms, cultural traditions, and religious practices that helped enslaved women combat violence and oppression. The nine strategies of resistance offered as modes of resistance employed by enslaved women are viable modes for modern-day women.

By re-examining the central themes of Reformation theology, Chung clearly and carefully describes the fundamental shape of Reformation thinking and introduces the reader to what was and is at stake in the Reformation's insistence on the centrality of the Gospel.

How do we know and speak about God's relation to this world? Does God reveal himself through his creation? This book recaptures a Christian vision of all reality: that the world is full of divine signs that are openings into God's glory. Bringing together insights from some of the tradition's greatest thinkers--Edwards, Newman, and Barth--Gerald McDermott resurrects a robust theology of creation for Protestants. He shows how and where meaning can be found outside the church and special revelation in various realms of creation, including nature, science, law, history, animals, sex, and sports.

Against the backdrop of the turbulent social and political landscape of today's Pakistan, Robert Rozehnal traces the ritual practices and identity politics of a contemporary Sufi order: the Chishti Sabiris. He does so from multiple perspectives: from the rich Urdu writings of twentieth century Sufi masters, to the complex spiritual life of contemporary disciples and the order's growing transnational networks. Drawing on new textual and ethnographic research, this multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary study of the Sufi tradition challenges the prevailing models of academic scholarship.

More from "the sportswriter who writes about faith" . . . Here's a second helping of Terry Pluto's plain and personal musings on topics we all face in everyday life: insults and what they really mean, prayers that don't seem to get answered, endless sibling rivalry, figuring out how to relate to our fathers . . .

"My goal is not to convert anyone reading the paper," Terry writes. "It is to make them think, and to bring some comfort. I write for people who are struggling with faith, or people in pain--physical or emotional. My job is to give them a voice, and to talk about the kind of faith we need to get through what life throws at us each day."

Terry already had a dream job: getting paid to write about sports for a daily newspaper. But when the opportunity arose to write about more spiritual topics, he embraced the challenge. Readers are glad he did. His "Faith and You" column now regularly touches the lives of thousands of loyal readers.

Terry writes for people who aren't always confident in their beliefs but know faith is still important to them . . . For people who sometimes get mad at their church or disagree with their pastor yet don't want to lose the spiritual side of their lives . . . For people of different faiths or backgrounds or who aren't even sure they're religious. These essays don't claim to have all the answers. But the questions they raise give readers something to think about all week.

This book shows how torture spiritually assaults the person. The "war on terror" has sparked great debate about torture. What exactly is torture? Should we torture suspected terrorists if they have information about future violent acts? Defining torture carefully, the book defends the idea that all people are valuable, and rejects moral defenses of torture. It focuses particularly on practices like sensory deprivation, which perniciously attack the human psyche. It also calls for an absolute ban on all torture, and urges Americans to repent for the torture the U.S. committed in the "war on terror."

Of all the women in the Bible, writes Nicola Slee, Mary has been for me the most ambivalent, the most alien and yet, at some level, the most alluring. I ve taken a long time to come to her or for her to come to me. I grew up in a religious tradition low church Methodism in which Mary hardly featured, other than in the nativity story. Yet it is hardly possible to exist as an inhabitant of the western world, with even half an eye open to the visual and cultural heritage of Christendom, and not to have been in some way affected by this woman, the woman of the Christian tradition.

With a collection of prayers and liturgical material focused around the figure of Mary, and the themes of motherhood, sisterhood, and female faith, this book projects a strong, contemporary attitude. It is clearly feminist, affirming the significance of Mary in the faith journey of contemporary Christian (and other) women, plus it challenges and critiques traditional stereotypes of Mary. The author explores the sorrows of Mary, her defiance and resistance, sexuality, sensuality, aloneness, independence and freedom, companionship, sisterhood, friendship, ministry, priesthood, contemplation, prayer and silence, wisdom, authority, faith, risk, and daring."

How were ideas and experiences of transformation expressed in early Christianity and early Judaism? This volume explores the social and philosophical frameworks within which transformative ideas such as resurrection and practices of becoming a oea new beinga were shaped. It also explores the analogies and parameters by which transformation was being observed, noted and asserted. The focus on transformation helps to connect topics that tend to be studied separately, such as cosmology, resurrection, aging, gender, and conversion. The textual material is wide-ranging and there are new readings of core passages. Ideas and experiences of transformations in early Christianity and early Judaism Connects topics that tend to be studied seperately (cosmology, resurrection, aging, gender, conversion) With wide-ranging textual material

"The View Through the Medicine Wheel" is a magnificent reflection on how to live creative, healthy and happy lives. We are all on a great journey - how different would your life be if you had a good map? Native American wisdom teachings of the Medicine Wheel explain how the Cosmos works and our place in it. Our ancestors saw the world in terms of circles and life cycles. The Star Maiden's Circle reflects life through the eight directions. This book of life maps shows you how to avoid pitfalls and master your own self. It presents the circle of the Egioc self - how we create a life of problems and dramas - and the circle of the Authentic self which teaches how to develop away from old habits and addictions. The Medicine Wheel culminates in the Twenty Count which is the Cosmos revealed in all its beauty and complexity. Shamanism is spiritual, ecological and psychological. No other book does full justice to the fabulous medicine wheel teachings.

Lindisfarne is more than a history, its a book of stories about the Holy Island and its people: their trials and tribulations, as well as their celebrations and successes, revealing how Lindisfarne and its people have coped with and adapted to change. The new book gives readers a feeling for the tiny island, which played such a large role in the history of England, plus a sense of its sacred enchantment.