Are you a seeker, a searcher, a pilgrim? Here is a 'thought for today' for each day of the year, a 'cairn' on the faint track, showing that someone has been this way before. Cairns mark turning points on a route, warnings where there is danger, people and events that are worth remembering from the past, inspiring us for the future. In deserts, in mountains, and in the maze of city streets we need help if we are not to lose our way. Jim Cotter writes from within the Christian tradition as a 'pilgrim soul', often on the edge of the Church, but in touch enough for the book to be commended by Stephen Lowe, Anglican Bishop of Hulme (Manchester). Here is a sample, for 31st January: "Constant exhortations to be good have little or no effect: they merely add to the burdens of guilt and fear, allies of a cold moralism, rigid and solemn... Of course you fail...Relax...Admit the shames and pretences, the pride and the hiding away, the refusal to let your own truth be seen... Accept that much failure comes from the difficulty of translating your desire to love into an ability to love well... So let laughter well up from the deeps, and tears too. Gently shake away the fear, and begin, slowly, to flow again."

The Self-Disclosure of God offers the most detailed presentation to date in any Western language of the basic teachings of Islam's greatest mystical philosopher and theologian. It represents a major step forward in making available to the Western reading public the enormous riches of Islamic teachings in the fields of cosmology, mystical philosophy, theology, and spirituality. The Self-Disclosure of God continues the author's investigations of the world view of Ibn al-ʿArabī, the greatest theoretician of Sufism and the "seal of the Muhammadan saints." The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the relation between God and the cosmos, the structure of the cosmos, and the nature of the human soul. A long introduction orients the reader and discusses a few of the difficulties faced by Ibn al-ʿArabī's interpreters. Like Chittick's earlier work, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, this book is based primarily on Ibn al-ʿArabī's monumental work, al-Futūḥāt al-Makkīyah "The Meccan Openings." More than one hundred complete chapters and subsections are translated, not to mention shorter passages that help put the longer discussions in context. There are detailed indices of sources, Koranic verses and hadiths. The book's index of technical terminology will be an indispensable reference for all those wishing to delve more deeply into the use of language in Islamic thought in general and Sufism in particular.