Spirit of Desire features 33 profoundly personal and diverse stories sharing the revelations, power, connections, and pathways explored in Sacred Kink. Some of the authors have been on the road for decades, others for a very short time; some have spoken about their passions before, while others are only now putting pen to page. Whether you are a traveler on the road of sexual expression, a spiritual seeker on a quest for enlightenment, or a curious creature wondering what this is all about, these personal journeys will take your breath away, leave you hot and bothered, and have you pondering the nature of love. A collection of personal stories for practitioners of spiritual kink.

The best introduction for the general reader to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

"The energy of Eros is powerful--alluring, fascinating, compelling. Many people--especially those who are single or celibate by choice or by circumstance--struggle with the containment of erotic energies. Many people in all walks of life wonder how sexuality and spirituality can live together in harmony. The instinctual energy of Eros and the compelling archetype of Self fire and guide the desires that lead to psychological growth and ultimate spiritual development." "These issues were central to Jung as he began to formulate his theories over against Freud's. The Fires of Desire explores the consequences of Jung's split with Freud over the nature of libido as sexual energy and describes the vicissitudes of that energy's unfolding. The central question is: What is the nature of erotic energy and how may it be transmuted? Just as Jung looked to mythology and the alchemical mysteries of medieval Europe to find answers from the realm of the deep psyche, today one continues to wonder: How is the lead of life transformed into gold? How are ordinary erotic energies transmuted into the passionate yearning that leads the soul to mystical union with the Divine?" "In this book leading Jungians--psychotherapists, analysts, educators, and theologians--revisit the issue that created the Freud/Jung split and attempt to reformulate our understanding of Eros in relation to Spirit. The Fires of Desire follows a developmental path depicting human experience. It marks out the similarities and differences between psychosis and mystical experience. It sketches the structure of feminine and masculine development. It looks at the process of psychospiritual growth and at the transformations of religious experience. In addressing the essential question of the transmutation of erotic energy, it asks: After therapy, what then? In its answer, it delineates four stages in the quest for the Divine and describes the nature of conjunctio or mystical union."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Walking in the Spirit is a journey into what the Bible teaches about life in the Holy Spirit. Author Kenneth Berding uses the apostle Paul and his words in Romans 8 to model what it looks like to live both empowered and set free by the Spirit. Written at an accessible level, Berding speaks to a wide audience as he seeks to connect readers to the life of the Spirit. His practical guide covers a variety of topics, showing readers how to set their minds on the things of the Spirit, put to death the deeds of the body, be led by the Spirit, know the fatherhood of God, and hope and pray in the Spirit. Berding applies the Bible to life through many of his own personal experiences, helping readers make connections to their own spiritual journeys. Discussion questions for each chapter facilitate personal reflection and small-group study.

Since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, Indonesia has undergone a radical program of administrative decentralization and neoliberal reforms. In Methods of Desire, author Aurora Donzelli explores these changes through an innovative perspective—one that locates the production of neoliberalism in novel patterns of language use and new styles of affect display. Building on almost two decades of fieldwork, Donzelli describes how the growing influence of transnational lending agencies is transforming the ways in which people desire and voice their expectations, intentions, and entitlements within the emergent participatory democracy and restructuring of Indonesia’s political economy. She argues that a largely overlooked aspect of the Era Reformasi concerns the transition from a moral regime centered on the expectation that desires should remain hidden to a new emphasis on the public expression of individuals’ aspirations. The book examines how the large-scale institutional transformations that followed the collapse of the Suharto regime have impacted people’s lives and imaginations in the relatively remote and primarily rural Toraja highlands of Sulawesi. A novel concept of the individual as a bundle of audible and measurable desires has emerged, one that contrasts with the deep-rooted reticence toward the expression of personal preferences. The spreading of foreign discursive genres such as customer satisfaction surveys, training sessions, electoral mission statements, and fundraising auctions, and the diffusion of new textual artifacts such as checklists, flowcharts, and workflow diagrams are producing forms of citizenship, political participation, and moral agency that contrast with the longstanding epistemologies of secrecy typical of local styles of knowledge and power. Donzelli’s long-term ethnographic study examines how these foreign protocols are being received, absorbed, and readapted in a peripheral community of the Indonesian archipelago. Combining a telescopic perspective on our contemporary moment with a microscopic analysis of conversational practices, the author argues that the managerial forms of political rationality and the entrepreneurial morality underwriting neoliberal apparatuses proliferate through the working of small cogs, that is, acts of speech. By examining these concrete communicative exchanges, she sheds light on both the coherence and inconsistency underlying the worldwide diffusion of market logic to all domains of life.

In the most influential chapter of his most important philosophical work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel makes the central and disarming assertions that "self-consciousness is desire itself" and that it attains its "satisfaction" only in another self-consciousness. Hegel on Self-Consciousness presents a groundbreaking new interpretation of these revolutionary claims, tracing their roots to Kant's philosophy and demonstrating their continued relevance for contemporary thought. As Robert Pippin shows, Hegel argues that we must understand Kant's account of the self-conscious nature of consciousness as a claim in practical philosophy, and that therefore we need radically different views of human sentience, the conditions of our knowledge of the world, and the social nature of subjectivity and normativity. Pippin explains why this chapter of Hegel's Phenomenology should be seen as the basis of much later continental philosophy and the Marxist, neo-Marxist, and critical-theory traditions. He also contrasts his own interpretation of Hegel's assertions with influential interpretations of the chapter put forward by philosophers John McDowell and Robert Brandom.

Befriending Our Desires portrays the intimate connection between desire and the spiritual journey. Philip Sheldrake explores the role of desire in relation to God, prayer, sexuality, making choices, and responding to change.

Winner: Honorable Mention from the Catholic Press Association Ralph Martin, drawing upon the teaching of seven acknowledged "Spiritual Doctors" of the Church, presents an indepth study of the journey to God. This book provides encouragement and direction for the pilgrim who desires to know, love, and serve our Lord. Whether the reader is beginning the spiritual journey or has been traveling the road for many years, he will find a treasure of wisdom in The Fulfillment of All Desire. It is destined to be a modern classic on the spiritual life.

Hidden—Richard Giannone’s searingly honest, richly insightful memoir—eloquently captures the author’s transformation from a solitary gay academic to a dedicated caregiver as well as a sexually and spiritually committed man. Always alone, always fearful, he initially resisted the duty to look after his dying female relatives. But his mother’s fall into dementia changed all that. Her vulnerability opened this middle-aged man to the love of another man, a former priest and Jersey boy like himself. Together the two men saw the old woman to her death and did the same for Giannone’s sister. In Hidden Giannone uncovers how, ultimately, these experiences moved him closer to participating in the vitality he believed pulsed in the world but had always eluded him. The mothering life of this gay partnership evolved alongside the AIDS crisis and within and against Italian American culture that reflected the Catholic Church’s discountenancing of homosexual love. Giannone vividly weaves his reflections on gay life in Greenwich Village and his spiritual journey as a gay man and Catholic into his experience of caring for the women of his family. In Hidden Giannone recounts a gripping religious conversion, drawing on the wisdom of the ancient desert mothers and fathers of Egypt and Palestine. Because he was raised a Catholic, the shift is not from nothing to something. Rather, it is away from the modeling power of institutional Christianity to the tempering influence of homosexuality on the Gospel. Gay or straight, so long as we remain hidden from ourselves, the true God remains hidden from us.

This classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the genesis and trajectory of the desiring subject from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit to its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault. Judith Butler plots the French reception of Hegel and the successive challenges waged against his metaphysics and view of the subject, all while revealing ambiguities within his position. The result is a sophisticated reconsideration of the post-Hegelian tradition that has predominated in modern French thought, and her study remains a provocative and timely intervention in contemporary debates over the unconscious, the powers of subjection, and the subject.