“Dr. Pita crams an amazing amount of information to produce a counselor’s handbook that is both readable and comprehensive. Significantly, the recovery methods of AA and rational emotive therapy are shown to be complementary, an approach the author has used successfully in her own practice. This book is another worthy addition to Crossroad’s superb counseling series. Recommended.”
“Dr. May reminds us that human beings are not objects to be fixed or improved . . . We need to quit worrying about who we are, to relax and be our natural selves; to accept our craziness, to find love rather than build it.”
The book Passion for Peace is an abridgement of Passion for Peace: The Social Essays by Thomas Merton, originally published in 1995. Most of the essays were written by Merton in the early 1960s. It was in those years that Merton realized the contemplative life of a Christian monk is not meant to center on an individual‘s spiritual state, but, instead, is meant to be focused on the larger, contemporary concerns of the world. Merton writes on people as diverse as Adolf Eichmann, Mohandas Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh and places as far-flung as Auschwitz and Vietnam. We hear the more mature voice of Merton, who had by this time rejected the religious romanticism of his younger years, but his eloquence and faith remain undiminished.
Joan lived a rather normal life for several years after she began to hear her voices.’ In this matter-of-fact way, Nash-Marshall weaves the spiritual into the mundane in her book about Joan of Arc. She doesn’t try to explain away Joan’s visions, nor explore feminist themes, of which there are plenty here. Instead, philosopher Nash-Marshall (assistant professor at Fordham and New York universities) writes like an engaging historian and simply tells Joan’s spiritual and political story.so well that I failed in my attempt to skim the book; I kept being pulled into the narrative. Along the way, Nash-Marshall helps the reader understand the role Joan’s spirituality played in her own life and in the history of France. Her philosophic exploration at the end, where she tries to understand the relationship of faith, God, and nationalism, is weak and fortunately short.