Anthony F. Aveni gathers specialists from diverse fields to discuss temporal concepts gleaned from the people of Mesoamerica and the Andes. Essays address how they reckon and register time and how they sense time and its moral dimensions. To them, time is a feature of the process of perception, not just the sharp present ingrained in Western minds.

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In Sacred Time and the Search for Meaning, author Gary Eberle contemplates how humans' view of time has evolved throughout history, how we came to measure time, and why we feel especially starved for it now. Eberle seeks to rediscover a renewed sense of meaning in life through looking for ways to enter the realm of sacred time or "sabbath time"—where we can reconnect with the slower, deeper rhythms of life that have traditionally been experienced through worship, prayer, and the observance of holy days. Drawing from the work of Western philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger, and on theorists from Jung to Foucault, he presents both an intellectual history of time and a personal account of his own search for sacred time. Along the way he formulates an insightful analysis of our culture's obsession with speed and efficiency, and he offers guidance for slowing down to savor life outside of schedules and routines, showing the way toward finding fulfillment in this increasingly accelerated world.

As we confront our own mortality, we might ask, "What has my long life meant and how have the years shaped me?" or "How long must I suffer?" Such questions reflect time-consciousness, the focus of this classic volume. The authors, from diverse disciplines in gerontology, act as guides in the exploration of the realms of time in later life and their meanings. As they examine how the study of time can give new meanings to aging, they also consider the religious and spiritual questions raised when human beings consider the temporal boundaries of life. This volume honors Melvin Kimble's contributions to gerontology and represents a new direction in the study of religion, spirituality, and aging.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A captivating exploration of deep time and humanity's search for purpose, from the world-renowned physicist and best-selling author of The Elegant Universe. "Few humans share Greene’s mastery of both the latest cosmological science and English prose." —The New York Times Until the End of Time is Brian Greene's breathtaking new exploration of the cosmos and our quest to find meaning in the face of this vast expanse. Greene takes us on a journey from the big bang to the end of time, exploring how lasting structures formed, how life and mind emerged, and how we grapple with our existence through narrative, myth, religion, creative expression, science, the quest for truth, and a deep longing for the eternal. From particles to planets, consciousness to creativity, matter to meaning—Brian Greene allows us all to grasp and appreciate our fleeting but utterly exquisite moment in the cosmos.

In The Meaning of Time author Gene T. Yerger proposes a theory that provides an answer to the question; what is the elusive notion of time and why has it defied definition over the ages? Since Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of gravity and Niels Bohr led the development of quantum theory, these two theoretical pillars of modern science have maintained a peaceful coexistence. So far, however, physicists have been unable to combine the two theories into a consistent and testable theory of quantum gravity. Yerger posits that the reason for this failure is the inability of the physics community to resolve the problem of time. In his theory, Yerger proposes that time and gravity are intimately related and this relationship serves as the basis for a quantum theory that deals with the gravitational force even on the smallest of scales.

In communities throughout precontact Mesoamerica, calendar priests and diviners relied on pictographic almanacs to predict the fate of newborns, to guide people in choosing marriage partners and auspicious wedding dates, to know when to plant and harvest crops, and to be successful in many of life's activities. As the Spanish colonized Mesoamerica in the sixteenth century, they made a determined effort to destroy these books, in which the Aztec and neighboring peoples recorded their understanding of the invisible world of the sacred calendar and the cosmic forces and supernaturals that adhered to time. Today, only a few of these divinatory codices survive. Visually complex, esoteric, and strikingly beautiful, painted books such as the famous Codex Borgia and Codex Borbonicus still serve as portals into the ancient Mexican calendrical systems and the cycles of time and meaning they encode. In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Hill Boone analyzes the entire extant corpus of Mexican divinatory codices and offers a masterful explanation of the genre as a whole. She introduces the sacred, divinatory calendar and the calendar priests and diviners who owned and used the books. Boone then explains the graphic vocabulary of the calendar and its prophetic forces and describes the organizing principles that structure the codices. She shows how they form almanacs that either offer general purpose guidance or focus topically on specific aspects of life, such as birth, marriage, agriculture and rain, travel, and the forces of the planet Venus. Boone also tackles two major areas of controversy—the great narrative passage in the Codex Borgia, which she freshly interprets as a cosmic narrative of creation, and the disputed origins of the codices, which, she argues, grew out of a single religious and divinatory system.

Does life have meaning? Is it possible for life to be meaningful when the world is filled with suffering and when so much depends merely upon chance? Even if there is meaning, is there enough to justify living? These questions are difficult to resolve. There are times in which we face the mundane, the illogically cruel, and the tragic, which leave us to question the value of our lives. However, Iddo Landau argues, our lives often are, or could be made, meaningful—we've just been setting the bar too high for evaluating what meaning there is. When it comes to meaning in life, Landau explains, we have let perfect become the enemy of the good. We have failed to find life perfectly meaningful, and therefore have failed to see any meaning in our lives. We must attune ourselves to enhancing and appreciating the meaning in our lives, and Landau shows us how to do that. In this warmly written book, rich with examples from the author's life, film, literature, and history, Landau offers new theories and practical advice that awaken us to the meaning already present in our lives and demonstrates how we can enhance it. He confronts prevailing nihilist ideas that undermine our existence, and the questions that dog us no matter what we believe. While exposing the weaknesses of ideas that lead many to despair, he builds a strong case for maintaining more hope. Along the way, he faces provocative questions: Would we choose to live forever if we could? Does death render life meaningless? If we examine it in the context of the immensity of the whole universe, can we consider life meaningful? If we feel empty once we achieve our goals, and the pursuit of these goals is what gives us a sense of meaning, then what can we do? Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World is likely to alter the way you understand your life.

One of the most enigmatic aspects of experience concerns time. Since pre-Socratic times scholars have speculated about the nature of time, asking questions such as: What is time? Where does it come from? Where does it go? The central proposal of The Structure of Time is that time, at base, constitutes a phenomenologically real experience. Drawing on findings in psychology, neuroscience, and utilising the perspective of cognitive linguistics, this work argues that our experience of time may ultimately derive from perceptual processes, which in turn enable us to perceive events. As such, temporal experience is a pre-requisite for abilities such as event perception and comparison, rather than an abstraction based on such phenomena. The book represents an examination of the nature of temporal cognition, with two foci: (i) an investigation into (pre-conceptual) temporal experience, and (ii) an analysis of temporal structure at the conceptual level (which derives from temporal experience).

Originally published in 2009 by New Page Books.