Practical Spirituality and Human Development

Ananta Kumar Giri is Professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai, India. He has taught and done research at universities in India and abroad, including Aalborg University (Denmark), Maison des sciences de lhomme, Paris (France), the University of Kentucky (USA), University of Freiburg & Humboldt University (Germany). His research focuses on social movements and cultural change, contemporary dialectics of transformation, and creative streams in education, philosophy and literature.

Practical Spirituality and Human Development: An Introduction and an Invitation.- Part One: Practical Spirituality: Understanding New Modes of Thinking and Transformative Practice.- The Calling of Practical Spirituality.- What It Means To Be Religious?.- Practical Spirituality: Human Beings Evolving into a Higher Level of Communion and Ethical Relating with One Another.- Critical Spirituality: Towards a Revitalized Humanity.- Practices of Nontheistic Spirituality.- The Ashram as a Secular Place: An Understanding of the Human as a Spiritual Place.- There Is No PathAnd You Are On It: Searching For The Self in Starting from Zero.- Life Is Story: Tales and Journeys in Practical Spirituality in the Aesthetic Plasma of Story in the Lila.- Creative Nonfiction is Everything: Postmodernism, Groundlessness and the Dual Portrait.- Consciousness and Energy: An Engimatic Concomitance.- Divine Path of Humanity: Co-Creating In the image of God.- Part Two: Practical Spirituality and Transformation of Religions and Societies.- Brahman and Karman: The Theory of Institutional Action in The Bhagavadgt.- Practical Spirituality: Judaic and Multi-Faith Practices of Transformations.- Practical Spirituality and the Desert Fathers.- Mysticism, Sufism and Practical Spirituality.- Quaker Process as Practical Spirituality for the Anthropocene Age.- Paganism as Practical Spirituality.- Beyond Self to Society and Sustainability: Lesson in Practical Spirituality From Sikhism.- Practical Spirituality and the Transformation of Political Power: The Great Law of Peace and the Influence of Iroquois Women and Policies on Early U.S. Women Suffragists.- Tolstoy and Practical Spirituality.- Discovering Reality as Old as the Hills Assisted with Gandhis Light: Some Notes on Practical Spirituality and Human Development.- Building a Peaceful World and the Calling of Practical Spirituality: Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer.- Falling Together: Practical Spirituality in an Impractical World.- Thomas Berry, A New Cosmology and Practical Spirituality.- Mysticism, Practical Spirituality and Hospitality: Walking and Meditating with Jacques Derrida.