Renewing the Sacred Published!

First I am grateful to all those who have followed this blog.  I am very happy to announce that the long promised book, Renewing the Sacred, is available for purchase.  You can order it  right now.  Just click on the following link---http://tinyurl.com/cr8lu78  
If you wish to write a review of the book for Amazon, I would be grateful.  While obviously a book on education inspired by the Baha'i Writings, Renewing the Sacred is not a Baha'i book or a book only for Baha'is.  It is a book about education.  I hope that you readers will  recommend Renewing the Sacred to your friends, schools, teachers, etc.  Announce it through Facebook and Twitter.  Bookstores such as Barnes and Noble, can order it if you ask them.  Libraries and all commercial book outlets, and all Bahá’í bookstores can also purchase it.

Renewing the Sacred is my first book-length solo publication, though not the first book that I have written.   In my last post I stated that two other books were in the process of being written.  But there is actually a third, which I have been writing for a few years now, and it will be first out the door--hopefully before the end of the year.  I decided to bring this one out first, because of the terrible economic situation humanity is in.  It is an application of some of the principles of Renewing the Sacred.  It is titled Gettin’ Through Hard Times Together: A Spiritual Context for Prosperity. 

The book argues that prosperity is never about producing material goods, making money, or any other indicator of material well-being, unless every member of the human family has sufficient material means to live in some measure of comfort and security.  This can only happen if there is a moral transformation among those who have over-accumulated, and thereby thrown vast numbers of their fellow family-members into dire want and penury. Their private self-concern is backed by a social system that is built upon values that justify exploitation and greed because it legitimates the notion of an unbridled profit motive.  It is this system that has brought us the popular characterization of the 1% and the 99%.  The system is unjust and immoral.  The system will not change unless people change it.  And people will not change it unless there is spiritual education.

The Universal House of Justice stated, I believe, the four pillars of this spiritual education.  In a letter written in 1974 to the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Italy the House wrote: “It is not merely material well-being that people need. What they desperately need is to know how to live their lives — they need to know who they are, to what purpose they exist, and how they should act towards one another; and, once they know the answers to these questions they need to be helped to gradually apply these answers to everyday behaviour.  It is to the solution of this basic problem of mankind that the greater part of all our energy and resources should be directed.” 

Each of these questions—Who are you?; What is our purpose?;  How should we act towards one another?; How do we apply the answers to the first three questions?--is given a full chapter in the new book, after an introductory essay sets the tone and context for this discussion.

Part Two is a discussion of what I like to call a sociology of the spirit.  The first chapter of Part Two traces the unfoldment of three social conditions, peace, unity, and justice, from their potentials within the collective human reality.  One small part of this discussion showed up in a blog post here October 2, 2011, that I titled Light and Dark.  These potential conditions of society are first spiritual potentials that exist as a hierarchy within the soul, and unfold in sequence opposite to their importance.  That is, the deepest aspect is the most important and last to appear: the modern day equivalent to Christ’s statement of spiritual rank, that the last shall be first and the first last.  Peace is the ultimate state, but it is dependent upon unity being established which, in turn, depends, upon social and economic justice reigning in collective human affairs.  Justice is the Best-beloved of all things in the sight of God.  And it is no surprise that the real name of the local governing Baha’i councils is the Local House of Justice.

The word economy means household.  There are actually three economies.  First and smallest and least important is the material economy which we all know about and which school says that it is there to help us get into.  But larger and greater than the material economy is the social economy, the public household which is our human and social relations.  But deeper than these two and educed by proper education is the moral or spiritual economy, the Divine Economy that finds its pattern and nucleus in the operations of the divinely ordained Bahá’í Administrative Order.  As I did with Renewing the Sacred, posts for the several weeks will be from this new book.