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

Rating:
Summary: A good biographical dictionary of spiritual movers
Review: The editors of Skylight Paths, together with Ira Rifkin, have put together a good collection of biographical entries of some of the key spiritual figures of the twentieth century. Unlike many compilations of this sort, the editors here define spirituality rather broadly -- thus, the collection includes people outside the Judeo-Christian mainstream, and even outside a theistic/religious spiritual sense.

The first set of people address are those who 'shook things up'. These include personalities such as Desmond Tutu, Mary Daly, Mary Baker Eddy, Elijah Muhammad, Starhawk, and even Bertrand Russell, an atheist who nonetheless helped redefine some of the parameters of how we think about religion and spirituality. Some of the people were virtual embodiments of their beliefs, people such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Mahatma Ghandi and Oscar Romero.

There are those who exercises a spiritual presence, whose 'being there' matter in profound ways, sometimes more than anything they said or did; in this case, the Dalia Lama is perhaps the best example, but under this category the editors also include Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Vivekananda, and two popes, John XXIII, originator of Vatican II, and the current pope, John Paul II.

The editors divide up those who had an intellectual force in their spirituality and those who made an impact most through their writing, but these are in some ways interchangable groups -- Carl Jung, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Joseph Campbell, C.S. Lewis and D.T. Suzuki are in these categories, and seeing the list of names without differentiation proves the point of the interchangability. Ira Rifkin's introduction also makes the point of the cross-pollination of these spiritual innovators across different areas.

Some people were revered by different religious and philosophical traditions even as they were strongly identified as members of their own faith traditions, such as Mother Teresa, Thich Nhat Hanh and Albert Schweitzer; others worked to bring traditions together in more explicit and deliberate ways, such as Deepak Chopra, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Black Elk. In an intriguing concluding section, those who spoke from silence are also included -- the towering figures of Thomas Merton, Ajahn Chah, and others complete the task.

This is a book of snapshots, brief biographies written in simple language, with a few excerpts of the actual words or writing of each figure. Each entry (none goes beyond three or four pages) includes a list of books by and about the highlighted person, other resources and contact information for related organisations, and photographs of the persons themselves in the sections between the broad groupings.

There is a useful index and information about other books by Skylight Paths in the back. This is a good companion for brief information and reflection on important spiritual figures.