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In our current era of holy terror, passionate faith has come to seem like a present danger. Writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have been happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare that the danger is in religion itself. God, Hitchens writes, is not great.
But man, according to George E. Vaillant, M.D., is great. In Spiritual Evolution, Dr. Vaillant lays out a brilliant defense not of organized religion but of man’s inherent spirituality. Our spirituality, he shows, resides in our uniquely human brain design and in our innate capacity for emotions like love, hope, joy, forgiveness, and compassion, which are selected for by evolution and located in a different part of the brain than dogmatic religious belief. Evolution has made us spiritual creatures over time, he argues, and we are destined to become even more so. Spiritual Evolution makes the scientific case for spirituality as a positive force in human evolution, and he predicts for our species an even more loving future.
Vaillant traces this positive force in three different kinds of “evolution”: the natural selection of genes over millennia, of course, but also the cultural evolution within recorded history of ideas about the value of human life, and the development of spirituality within the lifetime of each individual. For thirty-five years, Dr. Vaillant directed Harvard’s famous longitudinal study of adult development, which has followed hundreds of men over seven decades of life. The study has yielded important insights into human spirituality, and Dr. Vaillant has drawn on these and on a range of psychological research, behavioral studies, and neuroscience, and on history, anecdote, and quotation to produce a book that is at once a work of scientific argument and a lyrical meditation on what it means to be human.
Spiritual Evolution is a life’s work, and it will restore our belief in faith as an essential human striving.
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As the jacket cover of this terrific book says, "Dr. Vaillant lays out a brilliant defense not of organized religion, but of man's inherent spirituality." He finds that the positive emotions of love, joy, hope and forgiveness are rooted in the evolution of the human brain. He predicts that our spiritual evolution will continue, and quotes published research in neuroscience and related fields that support this idea.
His writing is informative, clever and witty, filled with humanity, compassion, and the wisdom of a scholar with a deep commitment to understanding how the tapestries of human connection and spirituality are interwoven.
He is justifiably well-known for scholarly publications derived from his direction of the Harvard study of adult development for 35 years, his work in alcoholism, and his willingness to integrate diverse points of view.
* During the chapter "Joy," you may cry as you feel Joy. During the chapter "Love," you will want to call home to say Hi.
* You will be pulled in by personal stories from the Study of Adult Development, and how these men have come around to positive emotions and spirituality.
* You will be inside a colossal head fake - a situation in which you're learning but it seems like you're playing.
In Spiritual Evolution, Vaillant does something amazing: he makes the reader feel the emotion in the chapter about that emotion - Joy, Love, Compassion, Awe, and more. Imagine having a book in which you could reach for the emotion Joy just by opening that chapter again. This is the psychoanalyst at his best - he has bottled the emotions. Furthermore, he's bottled them by connecting your curiosity about how the mind works with your love for Emily Dickinson. It's the best kind of learning when it feels like play. Imagine having a book that you open up, and Vaillant on the other side says, "Let's play."
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