Product Description

"Bringing Back the Spirit" is a prayer for humanity to understand and experience wholeness. The author takes us along a remedial path that includes everyone regardless of religious or cultural background, political preference, or education. In a deeply personal narrative style he relates his own transformative journey through Christianity, physics, Indigenous science, and spirituality to address critical issues from a Native American/First Nations perspective. He describes his separation from ultra-conservative views, how the Bible has been misused to support grand visions of national destiny and war, and why America needs to know its true self. "The ever-present issues between North America's First Peoples and society, including the Church," says Duran, speaking for himself, "will remain until leaders invoke ancient wisdom and moral courage to move the nation and the world toward balance. The influence of Church, Congress, and society can play a decisive role in the federal government's responsibility to the tribes. Only an inward change can kindle the human spirit and conscience to lovingly relate to all our human and non-human relatives in order to build a sustainable society."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2016772 in Books
• Published on: 2005-04-22
• Released on: 2005-04-22
• Binding: Paperback
• 294 pages

About the Author
Phillip H. Duran, Tigua Indian heritage, is a former faculty member and Dean of Science and Mathematics at Northwest Indian College. He has masters of science degrees in physics and computer science and became a candidate for the Ph.D. in computer science and theoretical physics. His main interest is in linking quantum physics with indigenous worldviews and is writing a second book that focuses on this area.

Customer Reviews

Journey of Healing & Wholeness
This is a book to listen to, feel, ponder--an important
contribution to a growing literature on the discovery and recovery of American Indian identity, culture, spirituality, and traditional knowledge or science. For Phillip H. Duran, a Tiwa Indian, scientist, and Christian, the search for identity and purpose is the central theme of this "difficult introspective journey of self-exploration and internal conflict." In his journey to reclaim his Pueblo identity, Duran speaks candidly about the difficulty of deconstructing old paradigms, shedding conformist ways of thinking, and recovering traditional paradigms in order to reconstruct a wholistic spiritual and integrated scientific worldview. I grew up among the Anishinaabeg and thought I had a pretty good understanding of the history of the European occupation of Turtle Island for the past 500 years. But Duran's insights into the ideology of Manifest Destiny and our government's systematic extermination of the original nations of this land helped me to ask new questions and think beyond my historical, cultural, and spiritual assumptions. His exposure of the American Church's witting and unwitting complicity in this nation's project of cultural and spiritual genocide is honest, fair, and heart-rending. The genocidal policies and practices of our government and churches, often hand in hand, have left a legacy of pain, loss, and grief in many indigenous communities of North America. As I began reading this book, I wondered if this shameful and violent legacy could be overcome. I wondered how the culture could be restored, and where hope could be found. Duran doesn't answer all of these questions, at least not in any complete sense, but he does gather up fragments of history, culture, spirituality, and traditional knowledge, while following the path of his personal story, in a magnificent effort to find the meaning of his own life, the richness of his own culture, the beauty of his own people, the depth of his own spiritual traditions. In making this journey, Duran reclaims the strengths that have sustained the Pueblo and other Native communities of Turtle Island for generations of occupation and oppression. This is an important book about an important journey taken with great pain, unbelievable gentleness and respect, an unsettling humility and humor, and breathgiving faith and hope. Read widely, this personal and courageous journey has the potential to move the church, if not the nation-through repentance, reconciliation, and restorative justice-toward partnership in recovering and celebrating the personal, cultural, spiritual, and national identities of the original inhabitants of North America. I highly recommend this book to those who are beginning to understand the breadth and depth of the wound festering in the heart of the church and in the history of this nation. --Rev. Dr. Bruce D. Martin, Director, United Campus Ministry, Penn State University, University Park, PA