"With this profound and magnificent book, drawing on his deep reservoir of thought and expertise in the humanities, James MacGregor Burns takes us into the fire's center. As a 21st-century philosopher, he brings to vivid life the incandescent personalities and ideas that embody the best in Western civilization and shows us how understanding them is essential for anyone who would seek to decipher the complex problems and potentialities of the world we will live in tomorrow." --Michael Beschloss, New York Times bestselling author of Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989 "James MacGregor Burns is a national treasure, and Fire and Light is the elegiac capstone to a career devoted to understanding the seminal ideas that made America - for better and for worse - what it is." --Joseph J. Ellis, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Revolutionary Summer Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian James MacGregor Burns explores the most daring and transformational intellectual movement in history, the European and American Enlightenment In this engaging, provocative history, James MacGregor Burns brilliantly illuminates the two-hundred-year conflagration of the Enlightenment, when audacious questions and astonishing ideas tore across Europe and the New World, transforming thought, overturning governments, and inspiring visionary political experiments. Fire and Light brings to vivid life the galaxy of revolutionary leaders of thought and action who, armed with a new sense of human possibility, driven by a hunger for change, created the modern world. Burns discovers the origins of a distinctive American Enlightenment in men like the Founding Fathers Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, and their early encounters with incendiary European ideas about liberty and equality. It was these thinker-activists who framed the United States as a grand and continuing experiment in Enlightenment principles. Today the same questions Enlightenment thinkers grappled with have taken on new urgency around the world: in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, in the former Soviet Union, and China, as well as in the United States itself. What should a nation be? What should citizens expect from their government? Who should lead and how can leadership be made both effective and accountable? What is happiness, and what can the state contribute to it? Burns's exploration of the ideals and arguments that formed the bedrock of our modern world shines a new light on these ever-important questions.

Many in the West today are familiar with the benefits offered by meditation and mindfulness, and keen to understand more about Buddhism. Written by a former journalist and Buddhist monk, Light on Enlightenment is an accessible guide to the Buddhist teachings, offering insight and inspiration for daily life, as well as a lucid guide on the path to enlightenment. Christopher Titmuss draws upon the experiences of real people to show how Buddhist teachings are relevant to the problems of Western society, and can exert a valuable influence on science, psychotherapy, green issues, our lifestyles and communities. Light on Enlightenment opens up for all of us the possibility of inner transformation and regaining control over our lives.

Darrin’s latest book addresses the coming and going of 2012. What has this shift meant for our planet? We are now in the New Golden Age of Enlightenment. What’s next? As a psychic intuitive and spiritual teacher, Darrin stretches us beyond mere reading and acquiring of spiritual knowledge for knowledge’s sake and into the action of finding wisdom through the application of our knowledge, then ultimately becoming builders and masters of light.

In this book, T. J. Reed clears the dust away from eighteenth-century Germany, bringing the likes of Kant, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Gotthold Lessing into a coherent and focused beam that shines within European intellectual history and reasserts the important role of Germany's Enlightenment.--Provided by publisher.

Short tales about how different generations of Zen masters reached enlightenment show the reader how to arrive at satori

Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau and Montesquieu are best known for their humanist theories and liberating influence on Western civilization. But as renowned French intellectual Louis Sala-Molins shows, Enlightenment discourses and scholars were also complicit in the Atlantic slave trade, becoming instruments of oppression and inequality. Translated into English for the first time, Dark Side of the Light scrutinizes Condorcet’s Reflections on Negro Slavery and the works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot side by side with the Code Noir (the royal document that codified the rules of French Caribbean slavery) in order to uncover attempts to uphold the humanist project of the Enlightenment while simultaneously justifying slavery. Wielding the pen of both the ironist and the moralist, Sala-Molins demonstrates the flawed nature of these attempts and the reasons given for this denial of rights, from the imperatives of public order to the incomplete humanity of the slave (and thus the need for his progressive humanization through slavery), to the economic prosperity that depended on his labor. At the same time, Sala-Molins uses the techniques of literature to give equal weight to the perspective of the “barefooted, the starving, and the slaves” through expository prose and scenes between slave and philosopher, giving moral agency and flesh-and-blood dimensions to issues most often treated as abstractions. Both an urgent critique and a measured analysis, Dark Side of the Light reveals the moral paradoxes of Enlightenment philosophies and their world-changing consequences. Louis Sala-Molins is a moral and political philosopher and emeritus professor at the University of Toulouse. He is the author of many books, including Le Code Noir, ou Le calvaire de Canaan and L’Afrique aux Amériques. John Conteh-Morgan is associate professor of French and Francophone, African-American, and African studies at Ohio State University. He is the author of Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa: A Critical Introduction.

From untruth to truth, darkness to light, ignorance to enlightenment, this is Vivianne Nantel’s journey. Intimately chronicling Vivianne’s quest to overcome a battered childhood, survive depression, advanced breast cancer, and near-death experiences, along with her journey seeking in India Becoming the Light is more than a compelling spiritual memoir; it is a moving odyssey. You can join the author as she walks the spiritual path with several enlightened masters such as Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath, His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Vasudev Sadhguru Jaggi. Becoming the Light: Realize Your True Enlightened Nature can be a gateway to unleashing your true and blissful nature. Filled with wisdom and spiritual knowledge, it is a narrative of duality and transcendence expressed in all its nuances. Vivianne shares invaluable knowledge about— • the science of yoga • consecration and mysticism • the many forms of love • transcendence in the pursuit of self-realization ​Whether you are already on a journey for well-being and enlightenment or just at its threshold, may this book provide the insights, inspiration, and courage you need in order to find your way.