Finding Peace Through Spiritual Practice: The Interfaith Amigos’ Guide to Personal, Social and Environmental Healing

This book by the self-proclaimed Interfaith Amigos (Getting to the Heart of Interfaith)—MacKenzie is a Protestant pastor, Falcon is a rabbi, and Rahman is a Sufi imam—promotes a meditative spiritual practice intended to help create inner healing and thus help practitioners promote change in a world suffering from violence and environmental damage. As part of a program to foster a sustainable, lifelong engagement in activist causes, the book includes exercises meant to prevent and heal idealism burnout and despair. Each exercise is rooted in ideas and ideals from the authors’ faith traditions, in many cases deriving from the mystic, meditative strand in each. Meant to stand alone as a spiritual guidebook, the book is nevertheless best understood in the context of the Amigos’ experience of interfaith exploration and the wisdom derived from it. The writing is uneven, but the book is accessible and engaging. It’s likely to appeal to those with interests in interfaith, the causes of peace and environmental activism, and contemplative practice. (Aug.)