| Summary: | "Spiritual confessions often comprise the notes of a personal crisis, typically set off by some dark reminder of the human condition, whether illness and bodily demise, addiction, loss of a loved one, or just the silent decay of hope and purpose common to all stages of life. These crises have often resolved into masterpieces of therapeutic insight--profound, radical, sometimes subversive, and still of value even in our age of scientific psychology. Making Peace With The Universe considers classic documents of personal religion on their own explicitly therapeutic terms by analyzing the agonizing backstories that inspired them. For millennia the world's astounding array of religious traditions have cultivated a particular psychological affect--an edifying spiritual mood--and developed daily practices to encourage it. Seen this way, religion was the forum for therapy before the modern scientific undertaking existed. This book understands classic and diverse religious confessions--William James; Muslim legal scholar turned mystic Hamid al-Ghazali; Chinggis Khan, as described by the Daoist monk Qui Chuji; Catholic jazz composer, pianist, and singer Mary Lou Williams; and Socrates, one of the earliest recorded examples of existential crisis--as exemplars that record the achievement of integrative psychological health through nourishing the spiritual mood, moving from personal crisis to peace with the universe"--
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