Ryuho Okawa, founder of the Institute for Research in Human Happiness (IRH), Kofuku-no-Kagaku in Japanese, has devoted his life to the exploration of the Truth and ways to happiness.

He was born in 1956 in Tokushima, Japan and graduated from the University of Tokyo. In March 1981, he received his higher calling and awakened to the hidden part of his consciousness. His thinking has been influenced by many philosophies including Buddhism and the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and Emmanuel Swedenborg.

He established the Institute in 1986 and for the past twenty years has been designing spiritual workshops for people from all walks of life, from teenagers to business executives. He is known for his wisdom, compassion, and commitment to educating people to think and act in spiritual and religious ways. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide and he has also produced successful feature length films (including animations) based on his works. The members of the Institute follow the path he teaches, ministering to people who need help by sharing his teachings.

In many of his books, Ryuho Okawa presents practical and immediate solutions to problems that affect all of us in one way or another throughout our lives: How can we be happy? How do we help our intimate relationships to grow and thrive rather than stagnate and die? How should we judge success materially or spiritually? What is the true meaning of life? How can we make ourselves mentally and spiritually stronger so that when adversity strikes we do not suffer so much? How can we be generous and compassionate without being taken advantage of or not achieving our goals? These questions are dealt with in the following books, which can be read as a series or as stand-alone titles. All offer bracing, thoughtful, gentle, and honest guidance on living a good life and being thoughtful, kind, loving, and generous.

I have a full belly after a potluck at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn. With plenty of women to meet and vegan food to eat, I didn't get to paw through the archives themselves. There was evidence of fierce dyke activists all around: Lesbian Avenger banners, Dyke Action Machine posters, and many more delicious materials. To make my flashback complete, they even had Joan Armatrading playing on the boom box.

The gathering reminded me of ye olde days of potlucks. Back before Isa Chandra Moskowitz was the vegan cookbook queen, and even before Post Punk Kitchen, she was organizing anarchist women's potlucks. These events (held in Park Slope, Prospect Heights, and the East Village) often doubled as planning meetings or info shares, with the constant of good food. There was always someone lazy who brought a bag of chips, but the bulk of the gang made a good effort. I recently ran across copies of Eat Me, the potluck zine. Isa was sharing her recipes even then.

What are the opportunities and challenges of being an activist?

First of all, there is the question of balancing activism with the rest of your life. Activists often feel that they have to give everything to their cause, at the expense of everything else. This can lead to burnout, imbalance, and a sense of futility. Hillary Rettig's book The Lifelong Activist is a wonderful companion for anyone who is, is contemplating becoming, or knows, an activist. It teaches you very practical steps and measures to take to make sure that activism is a joy not a burden and that every achievement leads you on to another.

So, how do you do what you need to do to change things. Josephine Bellaccomo's Move the Message is the perfect book to help you plan and execute your activism in as efficient, empowering, and effective a way as possible. From the very outset of planning and targeting your campaign, to using volunteers well and shaping your message, from talking to power brokers to taking it to the street, Move the Message not only helps you run a successful campaign, but provides invaluable insights into how you can be effective in all aspects of your professional life.

Finally, how do you sustain yourself psychologically in the face of violence and trauma. In Aftershock, long-time activist pattrice jones illustrates the importance of recognizing post-traumatic stress disorder and preventing yourself from being overwhelmed and isolated. She talks about the importance of honoring your body, supporting your friends, and trusting in your feelings, and also provides very hard-headed and practical advice on getting through the toughest of tough situations.

Reading an article about solar cookers, recently, I caught myself being skeptical. Waiting 3 hours for food to cook? Would a well-angled box covered in tinfoil really get hot enough? I was sipping my tea and thinking "no way." My sun tea. Newsflash, self! Tea brewed in a jar in the sun is solar cooking.

Pause, challenge own assumptions, consider giving it a try.

If sunshine is strong enough to bring health, burn your skin, power your home, turn whole fields of sunflower faces toward itself, of course it can cook food. Forget police barriers, sometimes I have to get over my own.

The Bhagavad Gita (the "Song of the Lord") is considered the most important work of ancient Sanskrit literature.

It is also, with the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, one of the greatest works on yoga. Part of the enormous epic poem the Mahabharata, the Gita tells the story of Arjuna, a warrior prince, who on the eve of battle experiences doubt and fear at the fighting to come. His charioteer, however, is none other than Lord Krishna, who strengthens his heart to face his destiny. The Bhagavad Gita as a Living Experience offers the unique combination of an expert Indologist, Wilfried Huchzermeyer, who examines the literary and mythic meaning of the text, and a yoga instructor, Jutta Zimmermann, who reveals the Gita’s deep wisdom about yoga in all its four major forms (karma [action], jnana [knowledge], bhakti [devotion], dyana [meditation]) and
shows how its wisdom can provide universal guidance for all humanity.

Yoga in recent years has been both demystified and increasingly guru-driven. Yet, the Truth that Yoga espouses is not something that is absent and far away, requiring great effort to find. Truth is present within you as the Life that is you. In Yoga of Heart, Mark Whitwell explores the tantric dimension of hatha yoga and how we can forge a union of polarities within our body: above and below, front and back, left and right, male and female. Yoga of Heart focuses especially on clearing the energy centers and meridians allowing practitioners to create a deeper intimacy with their partners and the vitalizing life forces in the universe.

Humane Education is more than just teaching children to be kind to their pets. It's teaching them to do what they can to make the world a less violent place.

This is the message of Claude and Medea: The Hellburn Dogs by humane educator and president of the Institute for Humane Education, Zoe Weil. Claude and Medea are two children who attend the same school, but come from very different backgrounds. They share, however, a couple of things in common. They are both inspired by a substitute teacher, the very odd Mrs. Rattlebee, who comes to their school after their regular teacher is injured; and they are both moved to act upon that inspiration when they stumble across a dog-napping ring in Manhattan, where they both live.

This charming story for nine- to twelve-year-olds offers a case study in making connections between caring for animals and caring for people, and will introduce the issues of humane education to young people in an accessible and enjoyable way.

For more about the International Day of the African Child, click here.

On the face of it, Wangari Maathai and David Kidd might not seem to have much in common.

One is a former Vietnam veteran and Transcendental Meditator; the other is a social justice and women’s rights campaigner from Kenya who was the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. Yet both share an abiding passion and concern. They both fear the collapse of the world’s ecosystems and the advent of global warming, and both have found an answer to it: They have planted trees. Millions of them. David Kidd planted twelve million trees throughout the United States as part of his American Free Tree program. Wangari Maathai planted thirty million trees throughout Kenya with the Green Belt Movement, her grassroots environmental and civil rights movement that not only reforested whole swathes of her country but was instrumental in overturning the corrupt regime that ruled Kenya for twenty-five years.

Kidd and Maathai are both Arbor Day Foundation award winners and both understand that planting trees does not have to be left to the experts. Anyone can do it. They also know that something happens when you plant a tree: it stimulates a reverence for, and love of, the planet that can drive not only you, but everyone involved with your ideals, to work harder for their community, their county, their state, their country, and beyond that for the planet as a whole. You can visit each of their websites, linked with their names at the beginning of this entry, to support their work.

In Growing America, David Kidd reveals the secrets behind effective community organizing and how to transform the desolate and polluted corners, medians, and sidings of the US into green and productive land. In The Green Belt Movement, Wangari Maathai reveals the struggles and triumphs of her campaign to reforest Kenya and how you can start your own Green Belt Movement campaign. Both books save trees as well. They are published, like many Lantern Books, on at least fifty percent post-consumer waste, chlorine-free, recycled paper!

For more on World Environment Day, click here.

Facing the Dragon is a book-length essay that attacks the related problems of human evil, spiritual narcissism, secularism and ritual, and grandiosity. Author Robert L. Moore dares to insist that we stop ignoring these issues and provides clear-sighted guidance for embarking on a corrective course.

The Jewel in the Wound: How the Body Expresses the Needs of the Psyche and Offers a Path to Transformation tells the compelling story of how author Rose-Emily Rothenberg‘s disfiguring scars guided her search for a connection with her mother, who died at her birth and, ultimately, led to her own psychological development. Movingly told from a Jungian perspective and in the intimate context of analysis, it is not only the autobiography of a person with a lifelong dedication to understanding the psyche, it is a portrayal of the unconscious as it reveals itself throughout the course of that person’s life.

The Heart is the meeting place of the individual and the divine: the inner ground of morality, authenticity, and integrity. The process of coming to the Heart and realizing the person we were meant to be is what Carl Jung called "Individuation." This path is full of moral challenges for anyone with the courage to take it up. Using Jung’s premise (that the main causes of psychological problems are conflicts of conscience) The Heart of the Matter takes the reader through the philosophical and spiritual aspects of the ethical dimensions of this individual journey toward wholeness.

Thresholds of Initiation by Joseph Henderson explores the initiatory rites that marked the lives of individuals and how we need to recapture their essence for wholeness and healthiness. Love Is All Around in Disguise by Irene Dugan and Avis Clendenen combines the wisdom of Ignatian spirituality with the insights of depth psychology, with specific attention to gender differences in psychospiritual development. In Creative Envy, Carlos Byington attempts to rescue the power of this much misunderstood driver of creativity, while in Lectures on Jung’s Aion, Barbara Hannah and Marie-Louise von Franz examine of Jung’s major later works on the Sumerian god.

When folks think of the great writers of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, they talk of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Edmund Spenser, and other poets and playwrights. But the most influential wordsmiths of them all may have been the extraordinary collective that produced the King James Bible. It is this language that has influenced the cadences, poetic directness, and expressive possibilities of the English language from John Milton to Martin Luther King, Jr.

English is hard to set to music: somehow it doesn't lend itself like German, Italian, or French to singing. Except perhaps in choral music—which has led to the happy marriage of King James English and Renaissance polyphony. One passage from the Hebrew Scriptures in particular seems to have caught the ear of a number of composers. It's a single verse, 2 Samuel 18:33, and in the version used by the composers, it runs as follows: "When David heard that Absalom was slain, he went down to his chamber over the gate, and wept: and thus he said: 'O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom. Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!"

It's a heartbreaking refrain. The Renaissance choral composer Thomas Weelkes (1576-1623) produced a beautifully lyrical version, as did Thomas Tompkins (1572-1656). More recently, the American composer Eric Whitacre (b. 1970) has attempted to capture the overwhelming grief of a parent for their dead child. It's interesting to hear how all three deal with the build-up of emotion within the constraints of the motet/madrigal, polyphonic form. The results, I think, match the restrained intensity of the prose itself. Let me know what you think.

The Middle East and the country of Israel are roiled in a centuries-old struggle for self-determination and land. The following two books explore that conflict.

The twelve women of Jerusalem (whether Christians, Jews, or Muslims) who are profiled in Making Their Own Peace face the unique pressures of living in a city steeped in history and blood, resonant with revelation and absolutism, and needful of mutual respect. These women tell their stories of cooperation and support in their decisions not to wait for political negotiations to succeed in bringing their communities together but through the forging of their own ways to live and work in peace every day. They offer an inspiring message of hope in the midst of conflict.

In The Olive and the Tree, educator Dr. Ruth Westheimer uncovers the secret world of the Druze, the peoples of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel, who are Arab in ethnic origin, Muslim by religious orientation, but maintain a different and secret identity in their various countries. Dr. Ruth concentrates on the world of the Israeli Druze, who have made a commitment as a minority within the minority to live within and fight for the state of Israel, itself a minority country in the Middle East. This book offers a fascinating insight into the politics and tensions of the Middle East.

For more on Jerusalem Day, click here.

When Pamela Rice, author of 101 Reasons Why I'm a Vegetarian told me that she was planning a veggie pride parade for New York City, based on one she heard about in Paris, I was skeptical. Who'd show up, I thought? Why would vegetarians want a parade?

Well, the answers are clear: over 800 of us showed up yesterday, a gray and chilly Sunday, and marched from Little West 12th Street in the West Village to Washington Square Park, where a somewhat soggy rally was held. It was quite a scene: the VivaVegie's prize mascot, Penelo Pea Pod, was married to PETA's mascot Chris P. Carrot; there was a fashion show for toddlers; and The Cheryl Hill Band rocked out.

In March 2002, my book, Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, was published after having been rejected by 83 publishers. I think that must be some kind of record, but there are probably other writers out there who can top that. The book's title comes from "The Letter Writer," a story by the Yiddish writer and Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91): "In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka."

A book about the "Nazi" way we treat animals is sure to be controversial, and a book that discusses both the Holocaust and the exploitation and slaughter of animals will hardly be a leading candidate for summer beach reading. Still, why should that have stood in the way of the book getting published? After all, doesn't a bold, controversial book often generate publicity that translates into sales? True, but for a book to be controversial and sell, it first has get published. That was my problem.

Lantern has made a commitment to pursuing the central issues of non-violence in its publications from a variety of perspectives.

From the perspective of law enforcement, Lawrence Blum, in Force Under Pressure and Stoning the Keepers at the Gate, makes an impassioned plea for the peace officer community and society to understand the tremendous pressures that cops on the beat face on a day-to-day basis. He argues that extraordinary stress is often ignored by the police and civil establishment and that officers don't know how important relaxation, proper emotional and physical conditioning, and access to therapy and other forms of mental processing are in making sure that they do not overreact to situations and cause them and others harm, if they are placed in a life-threatening situation again.

Charles "Sid" Heal takes a more tactical approach. His concern is to stop violence happening before it starts. In Sound Doctrine and the more specialized Illustrated Guide to Tactical Diagramming, Sid, who is a SWAT team member and a long time police and military tactician, shows how officers and others involved in policing can monitor and control a situation (whether a rioting crowd or a hostage-taker) in such a way that as few people get hurt as possible.

Violence permeates our society: in Boys Will Be Boys, Myriam Miedzian looks at the cult of masculinist violence that forces boys into roles where they deny their own and others' vulnerability and need for connection. That lack of connection may, indeed, have played a role in the murderous rampage that Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on at Columbine High School in 1999. Brooks Brown knew them both, and in No Easy Answers, written with journalist Rob Merritt, he explains how a culture of bullying and factionalism in high school (in some ways mirroring the society outside) led these alienated kids to commit the unthinkable.

How does one cope when you have been violated? In Aftershock, psychologist pattrice jones reveals how activists who have been subject to trauma, whether being arrested by the authorities or seeing those whom you are advocating for beaten up or killed, or even simply living in a violent world.

Finally, it would be remiss not to point out that violence against animals takes place every day, in a systematized and almost entirely ignored way on factory farms and in slaughterhouses around the world. We encourage you to look at other titles on our website to find out more about this "acceptable" form of violence.

For more on Peace Officer Memorial Day, click here.

1. A Serious Rejection

I’ve been a professional writer for decades, and while editors sometimes send my work back for revision, it’s been a long time since a piece was rejected outright. Well, recently it happened, and big time. The rejection itself was cruel—the editor not only critiqued the article itself, but the ideas underlying it, and in pretty harsh language—and, moreover, the essay in question was one I was really proud of, and had labored hard on.

To make matters worse, I had been "courting" this publisher (a liberal blog) for more than a year. I also thought that if they ran my piece it would not only give me huge credibility, but huge exposure—possibly even a career breakthrough. So there was a lot riding on this particular submission.

And, to top it off, this rejection came on the heels of a bunch of other professional and personal ones. So, taken all together, it was a depressing scenario. I actually wrote a friend/mentor a very depressed note in which I described the situation and wondered "whether I’m on the right path."

Holistic medicine offers a paradigm of wellness that differs from the trauma and severe deficiencies of our current "sickness care" system.

One aspect of this system that demands attention is the issue of vaccination. In their first five years of life, children are expected to undergo an extraordinary thirty-seven doses of eleven different vaccines, yet relatively few parents are aware of the risks involved. As the writers in The Vaccination Dilemma indicate, a growing body of research has linked immunization with autism, seizures, asthma, arthritis, Crohn’s disease, hyperactivity, and learning disabilities. Balanced and thoughtful, this book clearly describes the immune system, its workings (and what science does and does not know about them), and helps parents make educated decisions on behalf of their children.

In Iscador, Christine Murphy, formerly the editor of the magazine Lilipoh: Guide to Health, Nutrition and the Environment in the 21st Century, has gathered together essential information on a cancer medicine derived from the mistletoe plant that has been known for its therapeutic benefits for over eighty years. In the book, doctors and clinicians share their experiences working with conventional medicine, Iscador, and other alternative therapies, and provide holistic dietary guidelines to treat cancer patients. The book includes a full list of resources so that cancer patients can fully understand the options available to them.

After being diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of forty-seven and not getting answers from her physicians, Ruth Heidrich began her journey. "[I learned]I was responsible for my own health care," she reports. Heidrich went on to receive her Ph.D. in Health Management. Affectionately known as "the other Dr. Ruth," Heidrich is sharing what she has learned from first-person experience about preventive medicine and living a full and rich life in her two books, A Race for Life and Senior Fitness.

Read more on National Nurses Day and World Red Cross Day.