Author: Richard Smoley
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Beyond The Da Vinci Code: Christianity’s Real Secret
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On the surface, it’s hard to explain the astonishing success of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code. Many critics have pointed to its stale cliffhanger plot, its wan characterisation, and even to the flaws in its research. And yet it has sold over 40 million copies in hardcover. Its appeal must run deeper than any of its…
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Christianity: The Ultimate Secret
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Today there is an unprecedented thirst for the innermost secrets of Christianity. The quest for these lost teachings drives the plots of best-sellers like The Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail; it is discussed in major newsmagazines; and it is the subject of intense speculation and debate among believers and nonbelievers alike. What are these secrets?…
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Judas: The Greatest Disciple?
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At the climax of Dante’s Inferno, the narrator and his guide, Vergil, make their way to the deepest part of hell in the centre of the Earth. Embedded there is the fallen Lucifer, a hideous, three-headed figure with batlike wings. Each of his heads is chewing mercilessly on an archvillain. Two are reserved for Brutus and…
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The Gnostics: An Interview with Tobias Churton
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Tobias Churton is one of today’s most lively and spirited investigators of that underground stream of the Western tradition known as Gnosticism. He first became interested in the Gnostics while reading for a degree in theology at the University of Oxford in the 1970s. Soon after leaving, he became interested in exploring these ideas for…
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Awakening Our True Potential
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Man is born an unfinished creature. He cannot walk or talk or feed himself. Long years of care are required to bring him to even the most minimal levels of self-sufficiency. And yet even after the typical person has reached the stage of functioning that we call adulthood, something still seems to be missing. In…
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The Death & Rebirth of the Self
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Ancient myths exercise such great allure that one cannot help wondering what meanings lie behind them. The great psychologist C.G. Jung suggested these myths were projections of the collective unconscious, a universal level of the mind that expresses itself in symbolic and religious forms. By contrast, the French esotericist René Guénon and his school, who…
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A Way to Live: The Path of Self-Knowledge
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For all the scarcity in the world, one thing we never seem to be lacking is advice. We’re constantly deluged with exhortations of one sort or another – for diet, exercise, health, wealth, happiness, spiritual illumination. Of course these pieces of advice often conflict. The question then becomes, whose advice do we take? There are…
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What Do the Lost Gospels Have to Teach?
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Over the last century, a number of previously lost and unknown texts have come to light and illumined the origins of the main religions of the West. The most famous include the Nag Hammadi library, unearthed in Egypt in 1945, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in Israel in 1947. The Gospel of Judas is…
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Rescuing the Bible from Literalism
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“The world,” wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “is the totality of facts, not of things.” So it is, but facts take many forms. The hard-edged events of ordinary reality are only one form, and not always the most important. This insight can be hard to accept in the positivist world of mainstream Western thought. In…