Types of Love - ?

Love of nature. Love of God. Fraternal love, filial love, romantic love. Types of love or love typologies – this seems to be how love is often discussed.

What do you think of this approach?

What about love of dogs? Cats? Aunts? Second cousins…?

It seems to me that we can get a better idea of what love is by noticing what our different experiences of love have in common. Inventing another kind of love for each type of person or thing that we love may not really be so informative about what love is.


Reference – Original Faith: Chapter One, What Love Is

What Is Love?

Love Notes

Much of the commentary from last post was trying to get to what love is – which makes sense. How do you say whether universal love is possible without first saying what love itself is?

Maybe a good way to get started is to think about a person or experience that taught you something about love. Who or what was it? How was it communicated? People could even treat this as a “meme” and post something on their own blogs – please let me know in this discussion thread if you do.

Reference – Original Faith: Chapter One, What Love Is

Book Notes

Notice that Original Faith is now more widely available, including on Amazon UK. (Sorry about that, Vincent… had no idea it would happen so fast. But no overseas postage refunds, lol!)

I’d be interested in receiving emails about where and when people are getting the book – date of purchase would be useful at this point, especially as of the last few days and going forward.

Thanks to those who have linked here lately, including some who have reviewed the book. Links to those reviews that I’m aware of have been added to this site on the “media kit” and “press and media” pages. And you can see Firebird’s customer review on the book’s Amazon page.

Universal Love - ?

Blog posts will sometimes address topics covered in the book now that it’s available. Such posts will end by referencing the relevant book chapter and section to assist book readers. However, posts will be self-contained – you don’t need to have read the book to discuss them.

Universal love, or the love of everyone… do you think it’s possible? Leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. seem to have at least practiced an approximation of it, returning good for evil, to use the New Testament phrase, on a large scale.

Critics of the concept essentially think it’s pie-in-the-sky, and that a love so universal that it fails to discriminate between better and worse qualities, affirming everyone and everything, is meaningless – not love at all.

What do you think?


Reference – Original Faith: Chapter One’s “For the Sake of the Whole World: Universal Love.”

Original Faith: A Few Book-Related Items

This low-traffic holiday week is great for doing chores associated with a book launch – and it’s been a lot of fun having some of you run into Original Faith becoming available here on the site.

Some of you have asked if I’d sign your copy. Wish I could. Main obstacle is that I can’t mail things myself, so it would be added work for someone already out straight with doing things for me.

Some have asked if I’ll keep blogging – definitely.

I’ll be very interested in reactions to the book and welcome your feedback, either via this blog or email. I can’t answer all email but will certainly read it all and will answer as much as I can.

If you like the book, please recommend it to someone and pass on my URL. This would be especially useful in helping Original Faith find a readership in my circumstances.


Next up: Starting to think about love…

Book Note: Original Faith Available . . .

Original Faith: Finding the Interfaith Soul of Progressive Religion and Spirituality has just become available on Amazon and Target. (For libraries, it’s also in the WorldCat catalog.)

The number of inquiries about the book has gone up lately, so although the press release hasn’t gone out yet and parts of the information on the book’s Amazon page are still being developed, I wanted to let you know.

We’re hoping to get an international sales channel that would allow people outside the US to order online without having to pay so much postage, but not sure yet if that can happen.

I truly appreciate your readership here – the level of thoughtfulness that people have brought to these threads has been wonderful.

The book covers the whole range of spiritual life and growth as broadly and deeply as I’ve been able to experience and understand it. It was written over a period of twenty-five years, starting from when I was leading a full life, through years of disease progression, and into severe disability – “in sickness and in heath,” as they say. (I guess I was sort of married to it…)

Here are the contents. I believe that the book is likely to have something to offer you wherever you happen to be in your own experience and understanding of what our being here is all about:

Contents

Chapter 1: What Love Is

Chapter 2: Despair Under Heaven

Chapter 3: The Fact of Faith

Chapter 4: Stumbling Block: Ego

Chapter 5: Willingness and Practice

Chapter 6: The Nature of Work

Chapter 7: Nature’s Work of Transformation

Chapter 8: Working from World-Center

Chapter 9: Owning the Greater Claim

Afterword: Owning the Darkness


Love –

Paul