As human beings, what is our true relation to the animals on earth? What is our responsibility to our fellow creatures? Douglas Sloan explores these and other questions in this important book on the human animal connection. His explorations are based on personal experience and wide-ranging research into the work of Rudolf Steiner and others, including scientist students of the inner life of animals and committed defenders of animal wellbeing. Rudolf Steiner describes how from the beginning of creation humans and animals have been united in deep kinship. A loss of the sense of this human animal connection has resulted in an immense animal suffering the world over. Many questions arise: are animals conscious? Do they have a spiritual reality, souls and selves? Do they have emotional empathy, language and memory? Are we justified in eating them, hunting them, experimenting on them? This book argues that we must start to relate to animals in a completely new way -- a relationship that understands and respects animals' inner spiritual being, and one that requires a deep grasp of our own spiritual being in relation to theirs and offers help to do so, both in concept and in everyday action.

Insight-imagination is an important contribution to emerging postmodern understandings of science and epistemology. Sloan argues that the modem 'technicist' worldview is responsible for the ecological devastation and pervasive spiritual alienation threatening humanity in our age. He explains in clear, non-technical language how the ideas of physicist David Bohm, philosophers Michael Polanyi and Owen Barfield, and other holistic thinkers portray a way of knowing that engages the whole person in a deeply meaningful relationship with the world.

In this book, Douglas Sloan explores the impact that the Protestant theological renaissance had on American colleges and universities. In particular, Sloan focuses on the church's most significant claim to have a continuing voice in higher education: its particular ability to demonstrate a connection between faith and the dominant modern conceptions of knowledge. Sloan looks at the ways the mainline Protestant churches did, and did not, deal effectively with this faith-knowledge situation and the subsequent cessation of the church's large-scale engagement with American higher education.

Sloan argues that a fundamental transformation of our ideas about knowing, our selves, and our world is not only possible, but necessary. The key to this transformation lies in an understanding of insight-imagination--the involvement of the thinking, feeling, willing, valuing person in knowing. The possibility and mode of effecting this transformation is the subject of Insight-Imagination. Sloan examines alternative and potentially more constructive intellectual approaches as developed in the radical humanities and the world's great religious traditions. The author explores the role of education in the transformation of consciousness and the effect of this transformation on education.