Four Books

In 2013, I published four books.  I have updated them now in 2025 with new covers and fresh formatting, mostly copy editing.

You can see a preview of each book on Academia (links below).

 

 

UPDATED now in 2025 (See Preview)

This book is an attempt to address the question of the future, in this time of great uncertainty and peril. We can be certain today that our current world has reached a culminating point and that a catastrophe, i.e. a fateful down turning is under way (from Greek katastrephein “to overturn,” from kata “down” + strephein “turn”). In this time of chaos, predictions are of course out of the question. We need a way to orient ourselves to the future in its character as unknown but real. How can we participate in preparing a new world out of the disintegration of the present one? This book is one attempt to give some guidelines and examples of such participation. The key in the preparation of a new world lies in the mysterious relation between the creative power of fiction and its relation to reality.

Paperback and Ebook now available on Amazon!

 

UPDATED now in 2025 (See Preview): 

This 2012 book is a companion piece to my Making New Worlds. The kind of thought that can press a human being into service of the future breaks in and illuminates all things in a new light. The task is then to say the new meaning into existence without losing its power of transformation. But what could be the vehicle of such saying? A  way must be found to breathe new life into familiar images or language without losing the new meaning in the saying of it. Familiar words must be spoken but now with a new meaning implied in them. The parables of Jesus are an exemplary example of this process which I call, after Owen Barfield, tarning! This book is a sustained exploration of how tarning names the process of a new meaning bursting into the opened human being with the force of a lightning strike and then “descending” through language into, finally, shared perceptions of a newly configured world.

Paperback and Ebook now available on Amazon!

 

UPDATED now in 2025 (see Preview):

Our ancestors lived in a world saturated with spiritual significance. Unusual events occurring within the contingencies of life were easily comprehended in terms of spiritual reality (the work of the gods for example) and the future was generally pictured in terms of the “after-life”. People could thus feel a measure of security in their present circumstances and some certainty about their future. In contrast, our ordinary existence today seems bereft of any spiritual significance, generating in us insecurity within an existence that appears random, and uncertainty in the face of what has now become an unknown future.
In this series of essays, the author describes unusual events in his ordinary life that he chose to follow, or act upon. In so doing, he slowly discovered that a certain kind of non-random event is in fact a hint of unknown futures seeking to unfold into existence. The essays together form the outline of an art form, or method for proceeding from personal insecurity and uncertainty towards comprehension of the spiritual significance lying within ordinary existence.

Paperback and Ebook now available on Amazon!

UPDATED now in 2025 (see Preview):

The intent of my book is to subject our very human responses to the wide-spread felt sense of an imminent crisis pervading the world today to a microscopic examination. Although this feeling finds many expressions today, within many disciplines, I focus here on the philosophical/psychological stream of thought that speaks to a gulf between consciousness and world and the problem of overcoming that gulf—a problem I describe as overcoming solidity. The presence of the gulf seems to invoke an impulse to overcome it, to return to earlier times when our relationship to nature was more participatory, more alive, more of an I-Thou relationship… Part of my purpose here is to demonstrate the impossibility and therefore futility of any such attempt. We must, I claim, accept the irreversibility of history but, alternatively, we do not have to accept the positivist prejudice that asserts the absolute nature of our current consciousness-world constitution—a world of solid, separate things!

Paperback and Ebook now available on Amazon!