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For the millions of us who can't believe the conflicting and confusing claims of the mainstream churches, there seems to be a stark choice: either sacrifice your hard-won common sense or remain in permanent exile from religious life.

Seeing With Your Ears offers hope to those who find themselves stuck in this modern dilemma. Drawing upon the wisdom of many cultures, its powerful series of reflections cuts through the smokescreen of tradition to show how faith can be regained without putting the logical mind in cold storage. Using the insights of teachers, philosophers, and psychologists from all ages, its gritty and entertaining essays on sex, death, and purposeful living invite readers to use their own experiences to find the way to a personal spirituality. It speaks directly to those among us who would like to believe in something beyond the pedestrian realities of life, but who, up to now, thought it was impossible.

Dorothea Dix was the most politically engaged woman of her generation, which was itself a remarkable tapestry of activists. An influential lobbyist as well as a paragon of the doctrine of female benevolence, she vividly illustrated the complexities of the "separate spheres" of politics and femininity. Her greatest legislative initiative, a campaign for federal land grants to endow state mental hospitals, assumed a central role in the public land controversies that intertwined with the slavery issues in Congress following the Mexican War. The passage of this legislation in 1854, and its subsequent veto by President Pierce, touched off the most protracted effort to override a veto that had yet taken place.

An activist who disdained the women's rights and antislavery movements, Dix, an old-line Whig, sought to promote national harmony and became the only New England social reformer to work successfully in the lower South right up to the eve of secession. When war broke out, she sought to achieve as Superintendent of Women Nurses the sort of cultural authority she had seen Florence Nightingale win in the same role during the Crimean War. The disastrous failure of one of the most widely admired heroines in the nation provides a dramatic measure of the transformations of northern values during the war.

 Part of the series of collected meditations that includes Day of Promise, What We Share, and All the Gifts of Life.

 Includes inspiring observations about the natural world, solitary reflections and celebrations of family and community life.

Meditations prompt the quiet reflection we need to counter the busy days of our lives. Ranging from solitary reflections to social commentary, from wry humor to poignant memory, these readings urge us to reconnect with our inner selves.