I’ll admit there was probably no way I wasn’t going to love Annette Gendler’s 2017 memoir Jumping Over Shadows. I’m a sucker for cross-cultural romances, and for international dramas liberally sprinkled with phrases in foreign languages–especially when those languages are French, German, and Hebrew. And I can’t remember ever reading a novel or memoir of Jewish…
I love asking couples the story of how they met. Falling in love has always seemed to me something of a miracle. In the space of mere days–or even hours–you can go from not knowing another person exists to wanting to spend the rest of your life with them. If that’s not magic, what is? And then there are the…
Last month, I returned to France for the first time in several years, and one of the highlights of my trip was getting to browse my favorite French bookstore. As you can see from the photo, I didn’t leave empty-handed! The top three titles in the pile are all by a fellow named Arnaud Desjardins, well-known in France…
I almost didn’t buy Leslie Kean‘s new book Surviving Death, because I was worried it was nothing more than an overview of the afterlife evidence I’m already quite familiar with. But while there was certainly some description of the seminal case studies, there was also so much new material that it was absolutely worth the money I paid for a…
I was wrestling with some difficult feelings yesterday–the kind that good, spiritual people aren’t supposed to have. You know what I’m talking about? In this day and age, we’re all supposed to be enlightened and know that our circumstances aren’t responsible for how we feel–we are. And yet…that’s not how life is all the time.…
For all those who have asked me how I got from being an atheist with a PhD in analytic philosophy to being someone who takes seriously children’s memories of past lives…here’s a little of how that crazy journey began. I first started opening up to the possibility of meaning and purpose in the universe six years…
You may know author Martha Beck from her bestselling self-help titles such as Finding Your Own North Star and Steering by Starlight. Both of those books were of immense help to me during difficult transitions in my own life, but I had no idea when I was reading them just how hard-won were the insights that Beck shares in those books.…
First-person accounts of near-death experiences have been all over the bestseller lists in recent years. Think of Eben Alexander’s Proof of Heaven, Anita Moorjani’s Dying to Be Me, and Todd Burpo’s Heaven Is for Real. It’s hard to read these narratives without having one’s perspective on death–whatever it is–profoundly challenged. And yet individual stories of near-death experiences leave something…
Baby Katie learned to speak very early, and as soon as she could string sentences together, she began repeatedly asking her mother, “Remember when I was your mummy?” It was all fun and games–after all, kids say the darnedest things!–until one day her mother, Deb, decided to play along and asked her, “What was your name…
Less than four years after their wedding, Janis Heaphy Durham’s husband Max passed away from cancer. Durham was a spiritual person, raised in the Presbyterian church and blessed with a strong faith in God, but even if she suspected that death was not the end, she was entirely unprepared for what happened next. In fact, I doubt…
Choosing happiness and choosing circumstances of ease and comfort are two very different things. Challenge is essential to human happiness. It is, in large part, why we chose this life to begin with. Photo by Jörg Peter
A few years ago, philosopher Stephen E. Braude wrote an excellent book analyzing the evidence for life after death. His book, Immortal Remains, stands out from most other works in this field by virtue of its rigorous attention to detail and its careful consideration of alternative hypotheses for the evidence: notably, the super-psi hypothesis, which attributes apparent contact with the deceased…
My last post talked about longings that we can’t quite explain and thus often disregard as irrational and unimportant. This post is about an excellent tool to help us recover those crucial, disregarded desires: a 30-day guided journal called Chasing Your Dream. It so happens that one of the dreams that runs in my family is the dream…
Julius Lester writes in his book Lovesong: Becoming a Jew that as a young black boy growing up in the American South his favorite piece to play on the piano was Kol Nidre, the song that opens the observance of the Jewish holiday Yom Kippur. “When I stop playing,” he writes, “there is a painful yearning in my stomach,…
At 21, Mary Helen Hensley had a near-death experience in which she not only saw a play-by-play review of her current life, but she suddenly remembered all the lives she’d lived before. As the daughter of a Baptist minister, she didn’t even have reincarnation on her radar. But there it was, portrayed in heaven as a reality. There are…
