Lantern

Publishing and Media

Lantern

Publishing and Media

Archives: Books

Sweeping the Dust

With a foreword by Sharon Gannon, co-founder of Jivamukti Yoga School

In this book, a companion to An Offering of Leaves, much-loved Jivamukti Yoga teacher Ruth Lauer-Manenti (“Lady Ruth”) offers over forty more of the “dharma talks” that she gives at the beginning of each yoga class. Her reflections—complete with the Sanskrit verses that are the source of her studies, as well as the English transliteration and translation—are at once poignant and practical, and both minutely observed and expansive in their implications for our inner and outer lives. These teachings on yogic principles open up the emotional and spiritual pathways that allow us to deepen our yoga practice and go to the essence of the ancient wisdom contained within.

“A must read. The perfect companion to her first volume of teachings, An Offering of Leaves. Will leave you in awe of the infinite in the smallest grain of sand. Shows how the most extraordinary sacred jewels of existence lay in the seemingly mundane moment to moment.”—Jeffrey Cohen

“Sweeping the Dust is magical in the sense that it has changed my perception. Ruth pulls back the curtain to reveal the depth of everyday life. It encourages you to look within your heart. It is chock full of emotion. I laughed, I cried, I thought deeply. It was also a lovely present for my mom, and sister. Looking forward to her third book!”—Merissa Manley

The Wisdom of the Chakras

Some people are extremely bright yet emotionally crippled. Others are very loving, yet their daily lives are chaotic. Many have great faith but little clarity, while others are creative but stymied by a lack of confidence. Why are people so lopsided in their development? Why do some of us feel love but find ourselves unable to express it? Why do some of us commit ourselves to an endeavor “from the heart” only to become disenchanted? Why do some of us feel confident and powerful within ourselves, yet become frightened when we try to realize our potential? Answers to such questions may be found in the chakra system, the seven ethereal centers that both reflect and influence the qualities of our nature.

Some twenty years ago, the author—a clairvoyant from youth—began her examination of the chakra system to explain the imbalances so prevalent in people today and found that it does much more. In addition to correcting imbalances that prevent us from reaching our aspirations in life, the chakras also help us realize the spiritual beings we truly are already.

The Wisdom of the Chakras is the result of Ellen Tadd’s years of spiritual exploration and counseling work. She shows how the chakra system functions in everyday life, how our thoughts, words, and actions affect this system, and how the chakras in turn shape us. She also provides practical exercises that can be integrated easily into daily life to heal each chakra and attain the alignment needed for a healthy and spiritual life. The author describes each of the seven chakras, their functions, and their individual and interconnected qualities and components. Although each chakra is discussed independently, each nonetheless functions as part of an interdependent cooperative whole. As a result, the chakra system offers a framework and the tools needed to understand numerous common imbalances, individually and in combination, helping the reader to integrate the various characteristics and create greater harmony and balance in daily life.

For those who find themselves and their lives out of balance, the practical answers in The Wisdom of the Chakras will encourage them to look more deeply into our common nature and begin to see that our human nature is also the nature of the larger cosmos.

The Parallel Process

For many parents of troubled teenagers, a therapeutic program that takes the child from the home for a period of time offers some respite from the daily tumult of acting out, lies, and tension that has left the family under siege. However, just as the teenager is embarking on a journey of self-discovery, skill-development, and emotional maturation, so parents too need to use this time to recognize that their own patterns may have contributed to their family’s downward spiral. This is The Parallel Process.

Using case studies garnered from her many years as an adolescent and family therapist, Krissy Pozatek shows parents of pre-teens, adolescents, and young adults how they can help their children by attuning to emotions, setting limits, not rushing to their rescue, and allowing them to take responsibility for their actions, while recognizing their own patterns of emotional withdrawal, workaholism, and of surrendering their lives and personalities to parenting.

The Parallel Process is an essential primer for all parents, whether of troubled teens or not, who are seeking to help the family stay and grow together as they negotiate the potentially difficult teenage years.

The Philosophy of Animal Rights

In this clear elucidation of the philosophy of animal rights, professors Mylan Engel Jr. and Kathie Jenni explore the fundamental outlines of the debate over our duties and responsibilities toward nonhuman animals. They also examine how the issue of animal rights plays out in a classroom setting and address some of the questions that arise for both students and teachers in presenting and studying this subject. In two course syllabi, Engel and Jenni place animal rights in the context of ethical practice and the environmental movement. The book also contains an extensive bibliography of references and philosophical resources.

The Philosophy of Animal Rights grew out of a chapter published in Teaching the Animal: Human–Animal Studies across the Disciplines (Lantern, 2010), and contains an introduction to, and appendices on, Human–Animal Studies by Margo DeMello.

CONTENTS
Foreword by Margo DeMello
Introduction to Human–Animal Studies by Margo DeMello

The Philosophy of Animal Rights
Preface by Mylan Engel Jr. and Kathie Jenni
1. Introduction
2. Central Issues and Positions
3. Course Development
4. Challenges
5. Benefits to Students
6. Syllabi
         “Humans and Other Animals” by Kathie Jenni
          “Environmental Ethics” by Mylan Engel Jr.
Notes
References
Philosophical Resources

Appendices by Margo DeMello
1. Marketing Human–Animal Studies at Your University
2. HAS Resources across the Disciplines

Muzzling a Movement

In Muzzling the Movement, lawyer Dara Lovitz presents an in-depth and tightly argued analysis of the case of the SHAC-7. She reveals the history behind the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, examines the tendentious and speculative government case against the SHAC activists, and in so doing shows how the U.S. government has deeply compromised the freedom of speech and protest enshrined in the Constitution.

The ability to protest peacefully and to voice unpopular opinions without being arrested and imprisoned arbitrarily are cornerstones of the U.S. Constitution, and are the reasons why, in spite of the many limitations imposed upon sectors of its society over the centuries, the dominant order has been forced to change to allow people of color, women, and others to take their place in society.

Animals raised for their flesh or body products, however, remain without even the most basic natural rights: to move around, to associate with their conspecifics, to breathe clean air, and to nest or wallow or graze. They have no choice but to rely, as do all non-human animals, on human beings to speak up for them and articulate those basic rights, as well as to challenge those who are either indifferent to, or actively complicit in harming, their welfare.

Since the passage of the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) in 2006, however, the ability to document abuses, draw attention to the horrors, and raise public awareness about the suffering of animals in factory farms or scientific laboratories has been substantially curtailed.

Muzzling the Movement is an in-depth and tightly argued analysis of the case of the SHAC-7, the organization whose supposed activities ultimately led to the passage of the AETA. Lawyer Dara Lovitz reveals the history behind the AETA, examines the tendentious and speculative government case against the SHAC activists, and in so doing shows how the U.S. government has deeply compromised the freedom of speech and protest enshrined in the Constitution.

Teaching the Animal

In 2008, Lantern published Social Creatures, an encyclopedic collection of articles from the new and exciting disciple of Human–Animal Studies. Teaching the Animal is a followup collection of original pieces that discuss in detail the challenges and opportunities for all teachers of HAS.

Split into three sections, Teaching the Animal provides in-depth analysis of the nature of the discipline, the resources available, expectations of students and faculty, and a number of sample curricula in the fields of humanities, social sciences, and the natural sciences.

Teaching the Animal promises to be the definitive handbook for all teachers of HAS at both undergraduate and graduate levels. It also offers a comprehensive overview of the state of the disciplines in question, as well as the philosophical and practical issues involved in discussing the intersections of human and nonhuman animals in society.

Contributors: Philip Armstrong—Jody Emel—Mylan Engel Jr.—David Fraser—Theresa Goedeke—Lori Gruen—Kathie Jenni—Cheryl Joseph—Linda Kalof—Marina A.G. von Keyserlingk—Georgina M. Montgomery—Molly Mullin—Pete Porter—Annie Potts—Christina Risley-Curtiss—Carrie Rohman—Kenneth Shapiro—Julie Urbanik—Paul Waldau—Daniel Weary—Kari Weil

Into the Depths

In January 1984, Sr. Mary Margaret Funk, a Benedictine nun from Indiana, paid a visit to Maryknoll missionary nuns working in Bolivia. On what should have been a routine trip to the local town for a convocation ceremony, a flash flood swept away the jeep in which she, three nuns, a priest, and a disabled boy they had adopted were traveling. Only she and the priest survived.

What happened that night catapulted Sr. Meg into twenty-five years of prayer and self-examination. She relentlessly explored her relationship with the transcendent and immanent God, the profundities of her religious tradition, her commitment to spiritual practice, and her very human failings. It was a journey that left her spiritually naked before the terrible love of God; a journey to keep one’s heart open to the transforming wounds of suffering.

In the great tradition of spiritual confessions from Augustine to Thomas Merton’s The Seven-Storey Mountain, Into the Depths is a fearlessly honest and simply told account of one woman’s struggle to engage at the deepest levels with the most profound questions of faith

Sistah Vegan

New Tenth Anniversary Edition with a foreword by A. Breeze Harper

Sistah Vegan is a series of narratives, critical essays, poems, and reflections from a diverse community of North American black-identified vegans. Collectively, these activists are de-colonizing their bodies and minds via whole-foods veganism. By kicking junk-food habits, the more than thirty contributors all show the way toward longer, stronger, and healthier lives. Suffering from type-2 diabetes, hypertension, high blood pressure, and overweight need not be the way women of color are doomed to be victimized and live out their mature lives. There are healthy alternatives.

Sistah Vegan is not about preaching veganism or vegan fundamentalism. Rather, the book is about how a group of black-identified female vegans perceive nutrition, food, ecological sustainability, health and healing, animal rights, parenting, social justice, spirituality, hair care, race, gender-identification, womanism, and liberation that all go against the (refined and bleached) grain of our dysfunctional society.

Thought-provoking for the identification and dismantling of environmental racism, ecological devastation, and other social injustices, Sistah Vegan is an in-your-face handbook for our time. It calls upon all of us to make radical changes for the betterment of ourselves, our planet, and—by extension—everyone.

Featuring:

Tara Sophia Bahna-James—Melissa Danielle—Ain Drew—Delicia Dunham—Ma’at Sincere Earth—Tasha Edwards—Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo—Janine Jackson—Robin Lee—Michelle R. Loyd-Paige—Adama A. Maweja—Tashee Meadows—Thea Moor—Layli Phillips—Joi Maria Probus—Iya Raet—Angelique Shofar—Melissa Santosa—Mary Spears—Venus Taylor—Tishana Joy Trainor—Psyche Williams-Forson—Olu Butterfly Woods—Nia Yaa-Nebthet. 

Walking with Wisdom

Walking with Wisdom is a stunning sequence of twenty meditations for our time. Inspired by the Apocryphal Book of Wisdom, traditionally attributed to Solomon, Nan Merrill shows us that Wisdom is a treasured gift for all generations. Divine Sophia invites us to participate with her, through her tender guidance, in an existence that transcends death. The unseen Realm of Love is our true life, and Merrill—author of Psalms for Praying, the Psalms recast and spiritually reinterpreted for our times—takes us on a breathtaking journey into Love Consciousness.

In today’s violence-torn world and in our fragmented everyday lives, Wisdom is needed as never before, though She is more often dismissed or ignored. Times of silence, solitude, simplicity, and stillness are paramount as our souls yearn for a union with Wisdom and the Beloved. When we seek this Wisdom of the Heart, we leave behind false emotions of guilt and fear, and we enter the Infinite Reality that exists beyond all time.

An Offering of Leaves

Foreword by David Life, co-founder Jivamukti Yoga School

For many years at the Jivamukti Yoga School in New York City and throughout the country, popular and highly regarded yoga teacher Ruth Lauer-Manenti (affectionately known as “Lady Ruth”) offered her students “dharma talks”—stories from her life that accompany her classes and represent the yogic commitments to ahimsa (non-violence), compassion, and service. Some of these talks have now been collected in a book, many of them accompanied by a reading from classic Hindu texts, such as The Bhagavad Gita, The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Composed with humor and sensitivity, An Offering of Leaves is the perfect gift for the aspiring yoga practitioner and any spiritual seeker wanting to live with thoughtfulness and integrity.

“Ruth sees not only beauty and wonder in the world around her, but receives profound guidance from observing everyday activities like an old woman getting her hands dirty changing a flat tire or ants carrying carrots. This is because to Ruth all of life pulsates with the wisdom teachings of the guru—the enlightenment principle that surrounds and permeates through all of us at all times.”—Sharon Gannon, co-founder of Jivamukti Yoga School

“Ruth gives readers an understanding of the philosophy of yoga through all that she has experienced in her many dedicated years of practice under the guidance of my grandfather, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois.”—Sharath Rangaswamy

“I turn to An Offering of Leaves for guidance, comfort and inspiration. It motivates me to be a better wellness warrior, to walk the walk and talk the talk. Add it to your library. Your soul will thank you.”—Kris Carr, best-selling author and filmmaker of Crazy Sexy Cancer