Towards a New Renaissance

This episode reviews two landmark handbooks in psychology: The Oxford Book of Psychology and Spirituality and The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Transpersonal Psychology, both of which call for an expansion of the field beyond scientific materialism. Then the third book - I - Reality and Subjectivity by David Hawkins MD, PhD is one of the most brilliant and profound explanations of the relationship between the nonlinear and linear realms - the very fabric of our experience - that every seeker should read and study.

In this episode I review two books by American philosopher of religion turned foreign policy analyst Prof David Ray Griffin, whose work took an unexpected turn when he was asked to write an article to debunk ‘conspiracy theories’ surrounding 9/11. The further he looked into this, the less plausible and adequate the official accounts appeared. He has written over ten books on the subject, the last two of which I review here. His latest book is A Christian Gospel for Americans.

In this episode I review a book by Australian scholar David Tacey on religion as metaphor, where he steers a middle path between religious and scientific fundamentalism, promoting a symbolic approach instead; also a biography and DVD of the American theologian and social activist Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps best known as the author of the Serenity Prayer.

This first episode reviews a recent biography of Schweitzer by Nils Ole Oermann - my interest in him goes back to the 1960s when I first heard his Bach organ recordings then I subsequently became interested in his Ethic of Reverence for Life developed at his hospital in Gabon.