A distillation of over seventy years as a monastic and more than three decades of writing on centering prayer, Reflections on the Unknowable is Fr. Thomas Keating’s latest volume on how we might develop our intimacy with God and our experience of the Christian contemplative tradition. The first part of the book consists of a long interview with Fr. Thomas, in which he examines concepts of the divine‐including the astonishments, playfulness, and transformation available to the individual willing to open the door to God. The second section consists of thirty-one brief homilies, which range over topics as diverse as the Trinity and the message of Epiphany, spiritual evolution and cultivating interior silence, and the treasure of spiritual poverty and the beauty of chaos.

This book collects the intimate talks and daily presentations made by Trappist monk Thomas Keating to members of Contemplative Outreach, the organization Keating helped establish to promote the revival of the Christian mystical tradition. Oriented toward people who have been practicing centering prayer for several years, CONSENTING is addressed primarily to those with some experience of the spiritual journey and especially to those engaged in some form of contemplative service.

Wisdom is to reject conventional wisdom about almost everything.Thus begins Robert Powell's inquiry into the nature of Totality and the unreality of all else. This small but profound book is divided into three parts. In the first, Reflections, Robert Powell comments on some of humankind's most timeless puzzles and questions: Does the body actually exist? What is man, if not that bundle of concepts and images that comes upon him at birth? The second, Interchanges, uses a dialogue format that recalls Plato's Allegory of the Cave, in which a teacher and student questioner in a modern setting discuss non-duality, consciousness, and reality. The third part, Essays, is comprised of eight essays, each only a few pages long but addressing overarching themes including consciousness, fear of death, the end of the search, and the notion of the real as unknowable. Readers will leave the book with a satisfying conclusion to a brief, luminous work that can be read again and again.

For nearly a decade, Ray Leonardini has been visiting the incarcerated in Folsom State Prison and other correctional facilities, where he has been teaching and facilitating contemplative prayer—the contemporary manifestation of the ancient Christian meditative tradition. In Finding God Within, Leonardini demonstrates the extraordinary power of contemplative (or centering) prayer in transforming the lives of prisoners, and offers insightful analyses of biblical passages that show the power of prayer, faith, and surrender to ease addiction, stress, and despair. Filled with testimonies of prisoners who have been helped by centering prayer, Finding God Within is an essential introduction to contemplative prayer for people of all faiths engaged in prison ministry.

“[A] landmark book . . . Solnit illustrates how the uprisings that begin on the streets can upend the status quo and topple authoritarian regimes” (Vice). A book as powerful and influential as Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me, her Hope in the Dark was written to counter the despair of activists at a moment when they were focused on their losses and had turned their back to the victories behind them—and the unimaginable changes soon to come. In it, she makes a radical case for hope as a commitment to act in a world whose future remains uncertain and unknowable. Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next. Now, with a moving new introduction explaining how the book came about and a new afterword that helps teach us how to hope and act in our unnerving world, she brings a new illumination to the darkness of our times in an unforgettable new edition of this classic book. “One of the best books of the 21st century.” —The Guardian “No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that’s marked this new millennium.” —Bill McKibben, New York Times–bestselling author of Falter “An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely unexpected, roundabout ways.” —The New Yorker

Through the magnificent literary, scholarly, and psychological analysis of the text that is her trademark, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg tackles the enduring puzzlement of the book of Numbers. What should have been for the Israelites a brief journey from Mount Sinai to the Holy Land becomes a forty-year death march. Both before and after the devastating report of the Spies, the narrative centers on the people's desire to return to slavery in Egypt. At its heart are speeches of complaint and lament. But in the narrative of the book of Numbers that is found in mystical and Hasidic sources, the generation of the wilderness emerges as one of extraordinary spiritual experience, fed on miracles and nurtured directly by God: a generation of ecstatic faith, human partners in an unprecedented conversation with the Deity. Drawing on kabbalistic sources, the Hasidic commentators depict a people who transcend prudent considerations in order to follow God into the wilderness, where their spiritual yearning comes to full expression. Is there a way to integrate this narrative of dark murmurings, of obsessive fantasies of a return to Egypt, with the celebration of a love-intoxicated wilderness discourse? What effect does the cumulative trauma of slavery, the miracles of Exodus, and the revelation at Sinai have on a nation that is beginning to speak? In Bewilderments, one of our most admired biblical commentators suggests fascinating answers to these questions.

These reflections on contemplative life were delivered at Harvard University in 1997 in a lecture series endowed by Harold M. Wit. (Inside front cover).