Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
In our current era of holy terror, passionate faith has come to seem like a present danger. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have been happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare that the danger is in religion itself. God, Hitchens writes, is not great.But man, according to George E. Vaillant, M.D., is great. In Spiritual Evolution, Dr. Vaillant lays out a brilliant defense not of organized religion but of man's inherent spirituality. Our spirituality, he shows, resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are selected for by evolution and located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he argues, and we are destined to become even more so. Spiritual Evolution makes the scientific case for spirituality as a positive force in human evolution, and he predicts for our species an even more loving future.Vaillant traces this positive force in three different kinds of "evolution": the natural selection of genes over millennia, of course, but also the cultural evolution within recorded history of ideas about the value of human life, and the development of spirituality within the lifetime of each individual. For thirty-five years, Dr. Vaillant directed Harvard's famous longitudinal study of adult development, which has followed hundreds of men over seven decades of life. The study has yielded important insights into human spirituality, and Dr. Vaillant has drawn on these and on a range of psychological research, behavioral studies, and neuroscience, and on history, anecdote, and quotation to produce a book that is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human. Spiritual Evolution is a life's work, and it will restore our belief in faith as an essential human striving.
Check nearby libraries
Buy this book
Previews available in: English
Edition | Availability |
---|---|
1
Spiritual evolution: a scientific defense of faith
2008, Broadway Books
in English
- 1st ed.
0767926579 9780767926577
|
aaaa
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
2 |
zzzz
Libraries near you:
WorldCat
|
Book Details
Table of Contents
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. [207]-228) and index.
Classifications
The Physical Object
ID Numbers
Source records
Library of Congress MARC recordLibrary of Congress MARC record
Library of Congress MARC record
marc_evangelical_seminary MARC record
Library of Congress MARC record
Internet Archive item record
Internet Archive item record
Promise Item
marc_columbia MARC record
harvard_bibliographic_metadata record
Community Reviews (0)
Feedback?May 28, 2023 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
December 24, 2021 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
January 23, 2021 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
July 22, 2019 | Edited by MARC Bot | remove fake subjects |
December 10, 2009 | Created by WorkBot | add works page |