Books/Secondary Corpus
Books attributed to human sources demonstrating consciousness of the "spiritual counterpart of advancing material knowledge."[1]
General
The WHOLE EARTH CATALOG was published regularly from 1968 to 1972, but only intermittently thereafter. During its four years of regular publication, the Catalog earned a reputation, a following, and a National Book Award, the only time a catalog has been so honored.
Standing with one foot firmly in the rugged individualism and back-to-the-land movements of the Sixties counterculture and the other in the nascent global community made possible by the Internet, the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG offered an integrated, complex, challenging, thought-provoking, and comprehensive worldview.
Founder Stewart Brand, in his 1968 CATALOG article, "We are as gods" said, "At a time when the New Left was calling for grass-roots political (i.e., referred) power, Whole Earth eschewed politics and pushed grassroots direct power—tools and skills. At a time when New Age hippies were deploring the intellectual world of arid abstractions, Whole Earth pushed science, intellectual endeavor, and new technology as well as old. As a result, when the most empowering tool of the century came along—personal computers (resisted by the New Left and despised by the New Age)—Whole Earth was in the thick of the development from the beginning."
The Humanities
Architecture
Covers a wide range of issues relating to vernacular architecture including economies, technologies, inherited skills, social and family structures, physical needs, belief systems and symbolism. Explores the characteristics of domestic buildings in particular regions or localities, and the many social and cultural factors that have contributed to their evolution.
Ethics
Wattles surveys the history of the golden rule and its spectrum of meanings in diverse contexts, ranging from Confusius to Plato and Aristotle, from classical Jewish literature to the New Testament. He also considers medieval, Reformation, and modern theological and philosophical responses and objections to the rule, as well as how some early twentieth-century American leaders have tried to use the rule. Wattles draws these diverse interpretation into a synthesis that responds, at the psychological, philosophical, and religious levels, to the challenges to moral living in any given culture.
Philosophy
Exploring the 'roads less travelled', MacDonald continues his monumental investigation of the history of ideas.
The history of heterodox ideas about the concept of mind takes the reader from the earliest records about human nature in Ancient Egypt, the Ancient Near East, and the Zoroastrian religion, through the secret teachings in the Hermetic and Gnostic scriptures, and into the transformation of ideas about the mind, soul and spirit in the late antique and early medieval epochs.
These transitions include discussion of the influence of Central Asian shamanism, Manichean ideas about the soul in light and darkness, and Neo-Platonic theurgy, 'working-on-god-within'. Sections on the medieval period are concerned with the rediscovery of magical practices and occult doctrines from Roger Bacon to Francis Bacon, the adaptation of Neo-Platonic and esoteric ideas in the medieval Christian mystics, and the survival of these ideas mixed with natural science in the works of von Helmont, Leibniz and Goethe.
Religion
Nicholas Lash shows how the main contours of the Christian doctrine of God may be mapped onto principal features of our culture and its predicaments.
After an introductory chapter on 'The Question of God Today', Nicholas Lash considers - in chapters entitled 'Globalization and Holiness', 'Cacophony and Conversation' and 'Attending to Silence' - three dimensions of our contemporary predicament: globalization, a crisis of language, and the pain and darkness of the world, in relation to the doctrine of God as Spirit, Word, and Father.
Spirituality
First published nearly forty years ago and having been translated into numerous languages, this classic text is written by a Benedictine monk whose Christianity was profoundly enriched by his encounter with Hindu spirituality.
Described by its author as 'a little book to help Christians in their inner renewal, and to make them increasingly attentive to the call of the Spirit' it is a simple and practical manual for learning to live each moment in the presence of God.
10 short chapters provide a lifetime's agenda and are full of gems of wisdom. They focus on The holy presence, The mystery of God, Recognizing God in all things, Listening for God's call, The prayer of silence, Contemplative reading of scripture. This deceptively simple text contains all the building blocks necessary for a mature life of prayer.
The Sciences
Natural
Psychology
Viktor Frankl's 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning chronicles his experiences as a concentration camp inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live. According to Frankl, the book intends to answer the question "How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?" Part One constitutes Frankl's analysis of his experiences in the concentration camps, while Part Two introduces his ideas of meaning and his theory of logotherapy. It is the second-most widely read Holocaust book in the bookstore of Washington's Holocaust Museum.
According to a survey conducted by the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Library of Congress, Man's Search For Meaning belongs to a list of "the ten most influential books in [the United States]." (New York Times, November 20, 1991). At the time of the author's death in 1997, the book had sold 10 million copies in twenty-four languages.
Ecology
The basic thesis of the work is that environmental problems are only to be solved by people - people who will be required to make value judgements in conflicts that go beyond narrowly conceived human concerns. Thus people require not only an ethical system, but a way of conceiving the world and themselves such that the intrinsic value of life and nature is obvious, a system based on 'deep ecological principles'. The book encourages readers to identify their own series of such parameters - their own ecosophies. Ecology, Comunity and Lifestyle will appeal to philosophers, specialists working on environmental issues, and the more general reader who is interested in learning some of the foundational ideas of the rapidly expanding field of environmental philosophy.
Politics
First by far in profiteering in the war and death industry, America yet is still the global seat of benevolence and idealism. Such a soul-wrenching struggle for clarity and purity of purpose human life has never seen before. The depth of the mystery of how good and evil could so inhabit a single soul seems to have rolled in like a thick fog from the ocean of human evolution. The American soul is desperate for the burning power and purity of sunlight, the sunlight of spiritual transcendence."It feels like an endless hopeless night of blinding murder among you. Yet, dawn is inevitable. There are those Americans among you still, first alone and then in small villages and towns and city neighborhoods who are rising early in courage to be bringers of the dawn. "I am reminded of the midnight ride of Paul Revere calling our country to the fight for freedom which today has begun again. If money is your purpose, early death to all life is your certain end. This time you fight the forces of eternal extinction. Rise up. The dawn is at your door.
