MSI Press Blog

Today's book excerpt comes from  An Afternoon's Dictation  by  Steven Greenebaum . This book has been in the Amazon top 100 among interfaith and ecumenical books on many occasions. PART TWO: DEALING WITH DEATH AND DYING CHAPTER FIVE   It wasn’t lost on me that the questions that most oppressed my mind and had me angrily demanding answers from God weren’t answered until halfway through the revelations that were placed before me. Still, what I desperately needed at that moment of crisis in my life was some kind of handle on death and dying. So, what I gravitated to first were the revelations about these two difficult subjects. I read them, reread them, and lived with them. In all honesty, being open to it required me to reorient my thinking about God as well as life and death—which is a lot to unpack! But it did comfort me and help me to begin to move ahead. Given how spent I felt, this was no small task. The mind is not the soul. Nor is the body. Sometimes, the mind...

  BOREDOM “Behold, I am making all things new.” --Revelations 21: 5   We often use slogans to guide us through life’s complexity. I recently learned two slogans popular among young people today. YOLO: “You only live once.” It proclaims that we have only this one precious and wild life. So, we must make the most of it. This maxim reiterates the ancient wisdom, “Life is short.” Take advantage of our allotted time. A second piece of complimentary guidance is FOMO: “Fear of missing out.” There is a sense of urgency to fill our brief time here with stimulating activities. We want to cram as many experiences as possible in our available time. Only then can we feel satisfied and happy. We Americans assume that a fast-moving, active life is a fulfilled life. “An idle mind is the workshop of the devil,” a time-honored epithet reminds us. A boring life is a useless one. We want to do as much as we can as quickly as we can. Our goal is to be productive and efficient. We confess...

  Arthur Yavelberg, author of the multi-award-winning book,  A Theology for the Rest of Us , shares the following column from his blog: Auld Lang Syne -- on the perception of time. A Theology for the Rest of Us  has earned the following awards: Best Indie Book Award Literary Titan Silver Aware American BookFest Best Books Award finalist For more posts about Arthur and his book, click  HERE . Sign up for the MSI Press LLC newsletter Follow MSI Press on  Twitter ,  Face Book , and  Instagram .   Interested in publishing with MSI Press LLC? Check out information on  how to submit a proposal . Planning on self-publishing and don't know where to start? Our  author au pair  services will mentor you through the process. Interested in receiving a free copy of this or any MSI Press LLC book  in exchange for  reviewing  a current or forthcoming MSI Press LLC book? Contact editor@msipress.com. Want an  author-signed copy ...

  excerpt from Life, Liberty, & Covid-19 FLOWING TIME The river of life, time, and consciousness flows continuously. It flows from an inexhaustible source and moves toward an end shrouded in mystery. Uncertainty about the movement of time is inescapable. Despite our experience of the mysteriousness of time, we try to fix its natural flow with our ideas of what we think should happen. We try to control the uncontrollable and feel defeated and hopeless. We experience the futility of trying to predict or control the future, like trying to be Master of the Universe. The 2500-year-old book of Chinese Wisdom, Tao Te Ching (1) aptly observes, “Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter’s place. When you handle the master carpenter’s tools, chances are that you’ll cut yourself.” (74) During this stressful time, we may try to cope with our uncertainty by seeking islands of certain knowledge in the unpredictable flow of time. We may try to cope with the mys...