American Soul PDF Download

Author: John M. Barry
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101554266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 480

View

Book Description
A revelatory look at how Roger Williams shaped the nature of religion, political power, and individual rights in America. For four hundred years, Americans have wrestled with and fought over two concepts that define the nature of the nation: the proper relation between church and state and between a free individual and the state. These debates began with the extraordinary thought and struggles of Roger Williams, who had an unparalleled understanding of the conflict between a government that justified itself by "reason of state"-i.e. national security-and its perceived "will of God" and the "ancient rights and liberties" of individuals. This is a story of power, set against Puritan America and the English Civil War. Williams's interactions with King James, Francis Bacon, Oliver Cromwell, and his mentor Edward Coke set his course, but his fundamental ideas came to fruition in America, as Williams, though a Puritan, collided with John Winthrop's vision of his "City upon a Hill." Acclaimed historian John M. Barry explores the development of these fundamental ideas through the story of the man who was the first to link religious freedom to individual liberty, and who created in America the first government and society on earth informed by those beliefs. The story is essential to the continuing debate over how we define the role of religion and political power in modern American life.

Author: Jacob Needleman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440650446
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 401

View

Book Description
Looking at the lives of America's founders-including Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin-scholar and bestselling author Jacob Needleman explores their core of inner beliefs; their religious and spiritual sensibilities; and their individual conception of the purpose of life. The founders, Needleman argues, conceived of an "inner democracy": a continual pursuit of wisdom and self-improvement that would undergird the outer democracy in which we live today. Any understanding of America as a nation of spiritual values will in the years ahead require Needleman's work as a point of reference.

Author: Marion Goldman
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814732909
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 221

View

Book Description
Yoga. Humanistic Psychology. Meditation. Holistic Healing. These practices are commonplace today. Yet before the early 1960s they were atypical options for most people outside of the upper class or small groups of educated spiritual seekers. Esalen Institute, a retreat for spiritual and personal growth in Big Sur, California, played a pioneering role in popularizing quests for self-transformation and personalized spirituality. This “soul rush” spread quickly throughout the United States as the Institute made ordinary people aware of hundreds of ways to select, combine, and revise their beliefs about the sacred and to explore diverse mystical experiences. Millions of Americans now identify themselves as spiritual, not religious, because Esalen paved the way for them to explore spirituality without affiliating with established denominations The American Soul Rush explores the concept of spiritual privilege and Esalen’s foundational influence on the growth and spread of diverse spiritual practices that affirm individuals’ self-worth and possibilities for positive personal change. The book also describes the people, narratives, and relationships at the Institute that produced persistent, almost accidental inequalities in order to illuminate the ways that gender is central to religion and spirituality in most contexts.

Author: Sebastian Gorka
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1621579638
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
“Take it from someone who has been on the inside, who understands the fight we are currently in, and who knows what must be done to save our country. Dr. Sebastian Gorka’s latest book, The War for America’s Soul, leverages the former White House strategist’s expertise, driven by his determination to preserve what made America great in the first place.” — MARK LEVIN Our country is at war with itself. On one side are American patriots, dedicated to freedom under the Constitution; on the other side are leftists campaigning not just to win elections, but to radically transform the nation. In this political war for the soul of our country, America’s patriots need a strategist with a blueprint for victory. Luckily, we have such a man in Dr. Sebastian Gorka—a former strategist for President Trump and now a nationally syndicated radio host and a fearless culture warrior. In his essential new book, The War for America’s Soul, Dr. Gorka shows how America’s elite—in both parties—betrayed our heartland, sabotaged the American dream, and accepted national decline as inevitable. It took a candidate with remarkable vision, dauntless courage, and unbreakable determination to change the narrative. That man was Donald Trump. A candidate who owed no favors to special interests, Trump articulated a new American nationalism that has been an extraordinary force for economic and political renewal.

Author: Jon Meacham
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 039958983X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

View

Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham helps us understand the present moment in American politics and life by looking back at critical times in our history when hope overcame division and fear. ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The Christian Science Monitor • Southern Living Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history. He writes about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the birth of the Lost Cause; the backlash against immigrants in the First World War and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; the fight for women’s rights; the demagoguery of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and the isolationist work of America First in the years before World War II; the anti-Communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; and Lyndon Johnson’s crusade against Jim Crow. Each of these dramatic hours in our national life have been shaped by the contest to lead the country to look forward rather than back, to assert hope over fear—a struggle that continues even now. While the American story has not always—or even often—been heroic, we have been sustained by a belief in progress even in the gloomiest of times. In this inspiring book, Meacham reassures us, “The good news is that we have come through such darkness before”—as, time and again, Lincoln’s better angels have found a way to prevail. Praise for The Soul of America “Brilliant, fascinating, timely . . . With compelling narratives of past eras of strife and disenchantment, Meacham offers wisdom for our own time.”—Walter Isaacson “Gripping and inspiring, The Soul of America is Jon Meacham’s declaration of his faith in America.”—Newsday “Meacham gives readers a long-term perspective on American history and a reason to believe the soul of America is ultimately one of kindness and caring, not rancor and paranoia.”—USA Today

Author: Amy A. Kass
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1610170806
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 818

View

Book Description
"A stupendous compilation of the best things said by and to Americans . . . [I] open it every night at random and always find something valuable." —Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal "Indispensable . . . Should become The Book of Virtues for patriots." —Mona Charen, nationally syndicated columnist Concerned about rising cynicism and apathy, more and more Americans lament the decline in patriotic feeling and civic engagement. Fortunately, this wonderfully rich anthology is here to help all Americans realize more deeply—and appreciate more fully—who they are as citizens of the United States.At once inspiring and thought provoking, What So Proudly We Hail explores American identity, character, and civic life using the soul-shaping power of story, speech, and song. Editors Amy Kass, Leon Kass, and Diana Schaub—acclaimed scholars who among them have more than a century of teaching experience—have assembled dozens of selections by our country's greatest writers and leaders, from Mark Twain to John Updike, from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt, from Willa Cather to Flannery O'Connor, from Benjamin Franklin to Martin Luther King Jr., from Francis Scott Key to Irving Berlin.Featuring the editors' insightful and instructive commentary, What So Proudly We Hail illuminates our national identity, the American creed, the American character, and the virtues and aspirations of active citizenship. This marvelous book will spark much-needed discussion and reflection in living rooms, classrooms, and reading groups everywhere.

Author: Justin Buckley Dyer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442211482
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152

View

Book Description
American Soul brings together a variety of primary source documents related to the contested meaning and legacy of the Declaration of Independence, and the various speeches and writings assembled together demonstrate how competing interpretations of the Declaration have shaped, and been shaped by, two and a half centuries of political conflict in America.

Author: Andrew R. Heinze
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691227918
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

View

Book Description
What do Joyce Brothers and Sigmund Freud, Rabbi Harold Kushner and philosopher Martin Buber have in common? They belong to a group of pivotal and highly influential Jewish thinkers who altered the face of modern America in ways few people recognize. So argues Andrew Heinze, who reveals in rich and unprecedented detail the extent to which Jewish values, often in tense interaction with an established Christian consensus, shaped the country's psychological and spiritual vocabulary. Jews and the American Soul is the first book to recognize the central role Jews and Jewish values have played in shaping American ideas of the inner life. It overturns the widely shared assumption that modern ideas of human nature derived simply from the nation's Protestant heritage. Heinze marshals a rich array of evidence to show how individuals ranging from Erich Fromm to Ann Landers changed the way Americans think about mind and soul. The book shows us the many ways that Jewish thinkers influenced everything from the human potential movement and pop psychology to secular spirituality. It also provides fascinating new interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and Western views of the psyche; the clash among Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish moral sensibilities in America; the origins and evolution of America's psychological and therapeutic culture; the role of Jewish women as American public moralists, and more. A must-read for anyone interested in the contribution of Jews and Jewish culture to modern America.

Author: Anna Thiemann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351846965
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

View

Book Description
Rewriting the American Soul focuses on the political implications of psychoanalytic and neurocognitive approaches to trauma in literature, their impact on cultural representations of collective trauma in the United States, and their subversive appropriation in pre- and post-9/11 fiction. Anna Thiemann connects cutting edge trauma theory with the historical context from which it emerged and shows that contemporary novels encourage us to reflect critically on the cultural meanings and political uses of trauma. In doing so, it contributes to a new generation of trauma scholarship that challenges the dominant paradigm in literary and cultural studies. Moreover, the book intervenes in current debates about the relationship between literature and neuroscience insisting that the so-called neuronovel scrutinizes scientific developments and their political ramifications rather than adopting and translating them into aesthetic practices.

Author: Lisa B. Iversen
Publisher: Lisa Iversen
ISBN: 057802859X
Category : Family psychotherapy
Languages : en
Pages : 138

View

Book Description
This book is a psychotherapist's reflections on the relationship between psychotherapy, truth, ancestry, tribe, and democracy. Ancestral Blueprints: Revealing Invisible Truths in America's Soul provides a way to relate to the silence that is passed from one generation to the next by offering: insight into the wisdom of our elders and the influence of their lives on ours; consciousness regarding the consequences of unacknowledged truth in our families and country; a compassionate look at American history through the eyes of a psychotherapist who works with transgenerational loss and trauma; a unique perspective on the place of psychotherapy in American culture; and a framework for observing and interacting with life, inspired by our ancestral blueprints.