Spiritual Innovators: Seventy-Five Extraordinary People Who Changed the World in the past Century Book

This book is like an adventure into a well-stocked book store or library. In one volume you are introduced to so many insightful people and there get a taste of their extraordinary lives and works. It is a jumping off point to explore the ideas of people you may never have heard of, who nevertheless have had a profound influence upon you and the world.

The editor, Ira Rifkin, is an award-winning journalist who specializes in writing about religion and culture. He has received awards from the Associated Church Press, the American Jewish Press Association and the Religion Newswriters Association. Spiritual Innovators won the Spirituality & Practice Best Spiritual Book Award of 2002. Rifkin selected 75 diverse spiritual leaders of the 20th-century (many women are included) and commissioned religious journalists, authors, book editors, and other experts to write a profile of each to include a brief biography, excerpts from their writings and a list of resources and contact information

The collection is ecumenical and wide reaching with representatives as diverse as the Pentecostal Movement, the Nation of Islam and Japanese Buddhism. It is divided into eight sections according to how the editor viewed their primary contributions and impacted on the world. The section They Bore Witness With Their Lives, includes Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Hindu nonviolence advocate Mahatma Gandhi, the Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, black Muslim leader Malcolm X and Liberation Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, who said at Brown University's 2000 graduation ceremony, We often see poverty as an economic and social issue, but we must have a deeper understanding. In the ultimate analysis, poverty is death. It is unjust and early death. It is the destruction of persons, of people and nations.

In te sections "They made Intellect a Spiritual Force" you have such luminaries as Hans Kung, official theologian of Vatican II; the author of Christian Realism, Reinhold Niebuhr; novelist, poet and mystic, Evelyn Underwood, and Liberal Theologian Paul Tillich who referred to God and "The Ground of Being, " and in his classic work, The Courage to Be, wrote: Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of nonbeing. It is the act of the individual self in taking the anxiety of nonbeing upon itself by affirming itself either as part of an embracing whole or in its individual selfhood.

"They Changed the World by Writing" introduces Jewish author and human relations philosopher Martin Buber, comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, world religion expert Huston Smith, and the French intellectual, social activist and mystic Simone Weil, who at the age of five refused to eat sugar after she learned the French soldiers of WW I were not rationed it. She had a deep love for Jesus but never got baptized feeling it her special calling to remain a believer outside the church as a witness to its history of oppression and abuse of power.

Spirituality is one of those elusive terms we "know" when we experience it but have trouble defining what it means. Jewish philosopher Marin Buber recognized spirituality as those "moments of silent depth in which you look upon the world-order fully present."
As the saying goes, the map is not the territory though it will get you there. Let Spiritual Innovators serve as your map to lead you, however briefly, to that inner connection with the mystery of creation.

In the spirit of ecumenism that runs throughout this work let me end with the words of the famous Cistercian Monk, Thomas Merton, who wrote in Conjectures of A Guilty Bystander: If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.