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This book explores varieties of spiritual movements and alternative experiments for the generation of beauty, dignity and dialogue in a world where the rise of the religious in politics and the public sphere is often accompanied by violence. It examines how spirituality can contribute to human development, social transformations and planetary realizations, urging us to treat each other, and our planet, with evolutionary care and respect. Trans-disciplinary and trans-paradigmatic to its very core, this text opens new pathways of practical spirituality and humanistic action for both scholarship and discourse and offers an invaluable companion for scholars across religious studies, cultural studies and development studies.

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Practical Spirituality, Human Development and Creative Experiments for Alternative Futures: An Introduction and an Invitation.- Part I New Visions and Cultivation of Practical Spirituality and Human Development.- On the Holy Ground: Practical Spirituality and Practical Moral Courage.- Multidimensional Mysticism.- Practical Spirituality: The Art and Science of Conscious Living.- The New Spiritual Paradigm as Facilitator of Social Change.- Expressions of Self in Market, Society and Self: Towards Spiritual Praxis for Human Development.- Cultivating Practical Spirituality: Soil, Soul and Sarvodaya.- Practical Spirituality and Human Development: Circles of Gender Liberation and the Calling of Lokasamgraha.- Part II Creative Experiments in Practical Spirituality and Human Development.- Practical Spirituality and the Contemporary City: Awakening the Transformative Power for Sustainable Living.- Practical Spirituality: Dabbawala Case.- Practical Spirituality and Developmental Challenges among Tibetan Communities in India.- Practical Spirituality with Meher Baba and Human Development in the Modern Age.- Practical Spirituality and Religious Giving: Pluralism and New forms of American Muslim Giving.- Community and Practical Spirituality: Perspectives on L´Arche as an Arena for Contemplative Transformation.- Assertive Sprout from Wounded Psyche: Glimpses into Dalit Spirituality.- The Politics of Spirituality: Dissident Spiritual Practice of Poykayil Appachan and the Shared Legacy of Kerala Renaissance.- Transforming Life-worlds: In Praise of Kundrakudi Adigalar´s Practical Spirituality.- Subud: A Practical Mystical Path for the 21st Century.- Islam, Political Culture and Practical Spirituality in Kedah, A State in Northwestern Malyasia.- Ziyaret and Practical Spirituality: Women´s Shrine Visits in Anatolia.- Part III Transformation of the Material and the Spiritual and Practical Spirituality as New Movements of Awakening.- The Material and the Spiritual: The Provisionality of Matter and the Politics of Miracles in Japanese New Religions.- The Spiritual Politics of Bio-cultural Regeneration.- Human Consciousness and Its Discontents: An Ecological Reading of The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana.- Ecological Holism: Arne Naess´s Gestalt Ontology and Merleau-Ponty´s Bodily-Flesh Phenomenology.- Light Development in an Age of Climate Change.- Spirituality as a Bridge: A Holistic Approach to Social Development and Dignity.- Practical Spirituality and Journey with Sacred Mountains.

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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 l´homme, 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.  

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