Spirit Matters by Michael Lerner

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Spirit Matters
by Michael Lerner

Reviews from Amazon

Spirit Matters is a highly recommended book for anyone who longs to live in a world with stronger spiritual values and less emphasis on ecological destruction, material gain, and technological progress. And nowadays, there are a lot of us out there struggling with those phenomena, according to acclaimed rabbi and author Michael Lerner (The Politics of Meaning). Many individuals live as a "divided self," he explains. We privately hold deep, spiritual beliefs but are too uncertain or shy when it comes to asserting those beliefs in the public arena.

To bridge this duality, Lerner offers this thoroughly readable manual on how to introduce solid and healthy spiritual values into our world culture. This is not about pushing a hidden religious agenda or trying to create a fadlike movement around the latest New Agey ideology. Rather, Lerner presents an intelligent vision of people deeply caring for one another and our planet. Chapter by chapter Lerner gives examples of what readers can do for the environment, endangered animals, hospitals, prisons, the workplace, the home front, and neighborhoods. As a narrator and thinker, Lerner is sweeping and eloquent in his understanding of spiritual complexities. He also offers specific suggestions, such as improving education by eliminating "the SATs and other odious forms of testing" or addressing U.S. prison problems by eliminating jail terms for nonviolent crimes. As a spiritual and political manifesto, Spirit Matters cannot be praised enough. --Gail Hudson

From Kirkus Reviews
A comprehensive manifesto calling for the development of a socially and environmentally responsible spirituality. Tikkun editor Lerner (Jewish Renewal, 1994) is a former Clinton guru who helped develop the ill-fated Politics of Meaning some years back. Here he tries to hit the comeback trail with this earnest, long-winded, radical attempt at giving American society some spiritual CPR--an effort sorely in need of details, parables, or (at the very least) a sense of humor. Lerner anticipates a great spiritual awakening in our millennium, after which market profits will no longer dictate the cultural bottom line. Instead, a GNP of spiritual happiness, oneness with our creator (and creation), social responsibility, and goodness will transform our institutions and prevail throughout our noncompetitive globe. The idols of amoral scientism and unchecked greed will be toppled. The lubricant for this messianic world will not be religion: the organized religions, in Lerner's view, peddle a reactionary spirituality that is given to veiling women and circumcising men. Lerner's God, on the other hand, is the force of healing and transformation in the Universe, and his emancipatory spirituality will challenge the male chauvinism that objectifies women. Too many of Lerner's fine sentiments and proposals (for sharing resources equitably, forcing corporations and nations to be accountable for social and environmental sins, and reforming law and education) are hortatory rather than specific, and his spirituality in general has too many syllables to catch fire. His treatise is so warm and fuzzy that the bibliography is called Supportive Reading (although Lerner is not shy about plugging his own magazine ad nauseam). This ambitious and worthy effort would be far more effective if told in a voice that was less shrill and more eloquent. But that would require a different author. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Ken Wilber
"Profound and compelling....Read it for your own soul, and for the soul of the world as well."

Andrew Weil, M.D.
"If you are concerned about your health, the health of society and of the planet, read this book. Rabbi Lerner's emancipatory spirituality is just the right medicine for many of the ills of modern life."

Thomas Moore
"Spirit Matters offers the clearest and most passionate statement on the new spirituality....Don't overlook this one."

Dean Ornish, M.D.
"Spirit Matters is a call to action....that can help heal us as individuals and as a society. Highly recommended."

Larry Dossey, M.D.
"This book is CPR for the soulsurvival for ourselves, our society, our civilization."

Turning Wheel / Winter 2001
An important book of great interest to socially engaged Buddhists.

Real Change, Apr-May 2001
Shows how deeply spirituality matters in our...lives – and how deeply we suffer because our spiritual needs are constantly denied.