Soul Searching: A Handbook for Discovering, Developing, and Talking About Your Spirituality

Soul Searching: A Handbook for Discovering, Developing, and Talking about Your Spirituality offers you an opportunity to learn about the spiritualities of others while discovering your own. It does so by providing you with five chapters describing the nature of spirituality as well as its history, signposts, sources, and diverse manifestations in the world’s religions. It also provides you with five Dear Diary chapters that encourage you to describe, reflect upon, develop, and choose what is necessary for you to become a mature spiritual person. This is an ideal book for discussion groups that wish to learn about other religions, spiritualities, and how to make intelligent choices for personal and communal living. Appendices at the end of the book provide internet and print resources for further research into the spiritualities of the world, glossaries to help cut a path through the one hundred and eighty seven million web offerings, a list of key facts for understanding the classical spiritualities, and a list of dos and don’ts for talking about spirituality. If you are seeking to discover your own spirituality and understand those of others, this is a necessary part of your search.

Nathan R. Kollar has spent his whole life searching for ways to both understand and explain how to become more than we are - to experience the depths of the "now" while searching for the "not yet." He is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at St. John Fisher College, retired Adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Rochester, and Cofounder and Chair of the Board of the Center for Interfaith Studies and Dialogue. He also chairs the advisory board of Ontario County's Office for the Aging. He has authored five books the most recent of which is Spiritualities: Past, Present, and Future - an Introduction(2012); edited four, the most recent of which is Poverty and Wealth in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2016); and, hundreds of reviews and journal articles - The Interfaith Movement in a Liminal Age (2016) being the most recent journal article. Dr. Kollar's approach to our spiritual life begins with becoming mindful of where we live, who we live with, and what we are doing with our life "now." Such mindfulness only comes about in dialogue with our physical, social, psychological, and spiritual environment. However, we are not frozen to "where" and "when" we are now but we are always becoming more than we are. We never die. We are always being born. His retreats, workshops, reviews and writings embrace the challenge of change: embracing our losses while continuing to evolve together within an ever expanding cosmos.