Ecstatic Confessions is Martin Buber's unique, personal gathering of the testimonies of mystics throughout the centuries expressing their encounters with the divine. It features the author's seminal introduction to mysticism, "Ecstasy and Confession," which probes the nature of what Buber terms the "most inward of all experiences. . . . God's highest gift." Buber sifted through texts from oriental, pagan, Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim sources down the centuries to cull those moving records that manage to convey some quality of an experience that is essentially beyond the power of words to capture. Ecstatic Confessions orchestrates these reports from the edge of human experience into a revealing look at the nature of the ecstatic experience itself and the tension arising from the mystic's compelling need to give witness to an event that can never truly be verbalized. Ecstatic Confessions illuminates the intellectual development of its author even as it probes the almost insurmountable barrier between language and authentic mystical experience, which is, in essence, beyond the grasp of rational constructs.

"The Encyclopedia of Christianity is the first of a five-volume English translation of the third revised edition of Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon. Its German articles have been tailored to suit an English readership, and articles of special interest to English readers have been added. The encyclopedia describes Christianity through its 2000-year history within a global context, taking into account other religions and philosophies. A special feature is the statistical information dispersed throughout the articles on the continents and over 170 countries. Social and cultural coverage is given to such issues as racism, genocide, and armaments, while historical content shows the development of biblical and apostolic traditions. This comprehensive work, while scholarly, is intended for a wide audience and will set the standard for reference works on Christianity."--"Outstanding reference sources 2000", American Libraries, May 2000. Comp. by the Reference Sources Committee, RUSA, ALA.

The premise of Yoga is simple. There is an outer reality and an inner one, and our nervous system is the doorway between them. Effective Yoga practices stimulate and open that doorway. The result? Peace, creativity, happiness, and a steady rise of ecstatic bliss radiating from within us. Advanced Yoga Practices (AYP) brings together the most effective methods of Yoga in a flexible integrated system that anyone can use. Instructions are given in plain English for deep meditation, spinal breathing pranayama, bodily manipulations (asanas, mudras and bandhas), tantric sexual practices, and other methods that are systematically applied to swing open the door of our nervous system to permanent higher experience. This is a non-sectarian approach that is compatible with any belief system or religious background. There are over 240 easy-to-follow lessons here, including many hands-on questions and answers between Yoga practitioners and the author. Whether you are a beginner or a veteran in Yoga, the AYP lessons can serve as a useful resource as you travel along your chosen path. What readers are saying about the AYP lessons: "I searched for years to find a method of meditation that I can do. This is do-able." - AN "I've learned more about yoga in 4 months than in the previous 30 years of study." - SL" This is a very valuable inspiration for people taking up and maintaining meditation." - DB "Spinal breathing pranayama makes me feel so ecstatic, I want to do it all the time." - YM "After my first meditation session, I never felt so relaxed. You made me a believer." - JF "You make everything seem so simple, yet the practices are profound and dynamic." - SS "I wish I had this kind of informationwhen I started some 15 years back." - AD "I love the way you explain everything. So simple, logical, and so safe." - RY "These are the best lessons I have read on yoga anywhere." - RD Additional reader feedback is included in the last section of the book.

Challenging the prevalent view that in order to establish his Dialogical thought Martin Buber had to forsake his earlier mystical work, Israel Koren demonstrates instead that mystical paradigms serve as the foundation for Buber s dialogue and endow it with greater depth. While most scholars portray Buber s dialogical thought mainly in its Western and modern philosophical background, the author examines Buber s interpretation of Hasidic themes such as Devekut (attachment to God) among others, in order to establish that his dialogical writings evolved out of his interpretation of Judaism in general, his understanding of the Hasidic conception of the world and the mission of man in Hasidism in particular. Buber s work is therefore shown to be original mystical neo-Hasidic thought, which serves as a new link in the historical chain of Jewish mysticism.

Publisher description

Martin Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy is a collection of contemporary reflections on one of the most pivotal figures of modern Jewish thought. Born in Austria and reared in Galicia, Buber (1878-1965) became a spiritual representative of Judaism in German culture before emigrating to Jerusalem on the brink of the Shoah. His prolific writings on matters spanning the Hebrew Bible and New Testament to Hasidism and Zionism inspired diverse audiences throughout the world. In this volume, Sam Berrin Shonkoff has curated an illuminating array of essays on Buber’s thought by leading intellectuals from five different countries. Their treatments of Buber’s dialogues with Christianity, politics, philosophy, and Judaism exhibit Buber’s ramified legacy and will surely stimulate fruitful discussion in our own time.

This book traces the German-Hebrew contact zones in which Gershom Scholem, Werner Kraft and Ludwig Strauss lived and produced their creative work in early twentieth-century Germany and later in British Mandate Palestine after their voluntary or forced migration in the 1920s and 1930s. Set in shifting historical contexts and literary debates – the notion of the German vernacular nation, Hebraism and Jewish Revival in Weimar Germany, the crisis of language in modernist literature, and the fledgling multilingual communities in Jerusalem, the writings of Scholem, Kraft and Strauss emerge as unique forms of counterlanguage. The three chapters of the book are dedicated to Scholem’s Hebraist lamentation, Kraft’s Germanist steadfastness and Strauss’s polyglot dialogue, respectively. The examination of their correspondences, diaries, scholarship and literary oeuvres demonstrates how counteractive writing practices helped confront concrete and metaphorical crises of language to produce compelling alternatives to literary silence, amnesia or paralysis that were prompted by cultural marginality and dislocation.

"1910 stands out as a model of interdisciplinary and comparative study. . . . It brilliantly illustrates the complexity of a crucial period in European culture . . . focusing in particular on the intellectual intricacies of Mitteleuropa on the eve of World War I and of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian empire."—Lucia Re "Compellingly original. . . . In Harrison's work, Michelstaedter and his confreres (Campana, Slataper, Kokoschke, Rilke, Kandinsky, Lukàcs, Trakl, et al.) turn out to be considerably more fascinating and more emblematic of their time than anyone has been able to perceive before."—Gregory Lucente, University of Michigan

I and Thou is a summons calling us to dialogue today. Like the call Buber himself received, the book invites us to encounter the Other, our counterparts both human and eternal. Buber's spiritual awakening, his engagement with his people and his times, his wide reading, and his grief are contexts that open up this call to us to join with him in the fullness of a life of dialogue. If we follow Buber into his study, into the struggle of his inner life, into his achievement of dialogical existence--he opens up the wonders of I and Thou to us as his testament and his call to us to turn to dialogue, and he shows us the path to the fulfillment of that life. This book ushers us to that place.