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Books

The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art: Art History Reconsidered, 1800 to the Present

The history of modern art has generally been understood as a grand leap away from tradition, religion, and conventional norms, yielding decidedly secular art. Yet a majority of the prominent modern artists in every period had strong interests in the spiritual dimension of life, which they expressed in the new art forms they created. The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art challenges the dominant narrative of denial by presenting hundreds of little-known direct statements by scores of leading artists – cited from overlooked historical documentation as well as contemporary interviews – to demonstrate that spirituality, far from being inconsequential in the terrain of modern art, is generative. This overview insightfully presents, for the first time, a chronological survey of the major art movements that weaves together spiritual profiles of numerous leading artists and situates their stories within the cultural context of each period. The result is a significantly expanded understanding of the cultural history of modern art.

Relational Reality

Since the early 2000's discoveries in human biology have shown that humans are far more dynamically interrelated -- with other people, with nature, and within the bodymind -- than was supposed by the mechanistic worldview of modernity. This book was the first to demonstrate the coherence among these numerous relational discoveries and to explore their societal implications. Adopting a relational analysis and approach is already changing many fields, including healthcare, education, architecture, and community-based economics. The new relational knowledge derived from the discoveries in Relational Physiology can lead to a more insightful analysis of the crises of modernity and to a creative range of pragmatic alternatives.

The Resurgence of the Real

In our time, the 400-year-old problematic assumptions within modernity are being challenged and corrected by an eco-social orientation that draws on a lineage of eco-spiritual movements since 1800, which proposed creative alternatives to the modern-mechanistic worldview and the anti-organic social theories it spawned. This book changes the way we think about living in the modern world.

States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age

States of Grace makes the case that the antidote to both the meaninglessness inherent in the modern age and the "denial of meaning" declared by deconstructive postmodernism lies in the last place that proponents of either of those two orientations would ever look: the core teachings and practices of the great spiritual traditions.

Missing Mary: The ReEmergence of the Queen of Heaven in the Modern Church

The religious connotations of the Virgin Mary were "streamlined" when the Roman Catholic Church modernized itself at Vatican II. Although numerous constructive changes resulted from that global conference, the aesthetic, symbolic, cosmological, and mystical dimensions of Mary's spiritual presence were largely discarded in favor of a more rational version: solely the mother of Jesus and the first Christian. Missing Mary examines the cultural forces of modernity that required such a radical diminution and explores the deep meanings of Mary in her fullness.

Green Politics: The Global Promise

Green Politics presents a insightful and original study of the Green Party in Germany and other European countries in 1984. It brought the eco-social, Green political perspective from Europe and also suggested ways in which Green Politics could take root here. The organization that eventually became the Green Party of the United States was founded six months after this book was published.

The Spiritual Dimension of Green Politics

The text of this book was originally presented as the 1984 annual lecture of the E.F. Schumacher Society of America, in New Haven, CT. In it, Charlene Spretnak brings Green, ecospiritual insights to bear on three issues of ontology and ethics: "Who are we? What is our nature?" "How shall we relate to our context, the rest of the natural world?" "How shall we relate to other people?"

Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths

For thousands of years before the classical myths were recorded by Hesiod and Homer, the spiritual presence of the Goddess in her myriad forms was the focus of religion and culture. In Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, Charlene Spretnak re-creates the original, goddess-centered myths and illuminates the contemporary emergence of a spirituality based on our embeddedness in nature.

The Politics of Women's Spirituality

In the early years of the women's spirituality movement, this anthology brought together leading figures and suggested a three-part structure for understanding the focus the emergent phenomenon: the historical, the personal, and the political. This chorus of voices explores women's search for authentic spiritual experience, past and present.
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