How can a book bring martial arts, meditation, quantum physics, Reiki healing, health, well-being, and ones place in the world together and explain them in a way that highlights their connection and uniqueness as part of a universal whole? Here, we describe the essence of what binds the universe together and connects these seemingly disparate things, energy. We discuss how energy is the root of all these things and how we can harness its great power and potential to create lives for ourselves that are empowering, exhilarating, loving, and fifilled with a sense of awe and a desire to explore and discover . . . the way life is meant to be!

How can a book bring martial arts, meditation, quantum physics, Reiki healing, health, well-being, and one's place in the world together and explain them in a way that highlights their connection and uniqueness as part of a universal whole? Here, we describe the essence of what binds the universe together and connects these seemingly disparate things, energy. We discuss how energy is the root of all these things and how we can harness its great power and potential to create lives for ourselves that are empowering, exhilarating, loving, and fifilled with a sense of awe and a desire to explore and discover . . . the way life is meant to be!

There is an almost desperate quest for spirituality in our time. The nones claim to be spiritual, but not religious. Gurus abound; quick fixes are everywhere. In Thanks Be for These the Rev. Richard Gilbert provides a spiritual starting point for both the spiritual and the religious seeker. Here is a collection of meditations written from the perspective of a mystical religious humanist. Gilbert claims that gratitude is at the heart of the religious experience. It is fundamentally a spiritual act. We are grateful, in the first place, for being itself. Everything else is a bonus. This gratitude is expressed not in the philosophical abstract but in the existential concrete. It is details of the everyday which make life worth living despite our finitude and the inherent messiness of existence. Gilbert divides the book in two sectionsThanksliving for the blessings of being; and Gratitude in Grief, a collection of materials designed for memorial services at time of death. Thanks Be for These challenges us to dig deeply into the meaning of our lives. These meditations on gratitude place the responsibility of living gratefully squarely on uswhere it belongs.

In the early twenty-first century, nationalism has seen a surprising resurgence across the Western world. In the Catalan Autonomous Community in northeastern Spain, this resurgence has been most apparent in widespread support for Catalonia’s pro-independence movement, and the popular assertion of Catalan symbols, culture and identity in everyday life. Nourishing the Nation provides an ethnographic account of the everyday experience of national identity in Catalonia, using an essential, everyday object of consumption: food. As a crucial element of Catalan cultural life, a focus on food provides unique insight into the lived realities of Catalan nationalism, and how Catalans experience and express their national identity today.

The Endearing World of a Maverick, a first-person narrative, is a collection of three true stories. The first story, The ‘Up Train’ – The ‘Down Train’ is about a charming couple from Chennai. The Midsummer Chase is the second story and it’s about the author’s friend and his amiable wife.These two stories confirm the adage, ‘World is common to all; what we get, is what we try for, and that includes a life partner!’ The third story, Her Student’s Teacher is about the author’s affection for a little Assamese girl, who gave him the joy of experiencing his second childhood. The unexpected dénouement makes these stories interesting, endorsing the belief that the nicest place to be is in someone’s thoughts and prayers.Get ready to be carried away by the action and find yourselves identifying with the characters that proclaim every love story is beautiful.