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Dear Friend,

Welcome to our 2010 edition of Steiner & Spirit, which continues our celebration of the best contemporary anthroposophic and related writings. I hope you find it to be a source of inspiration and growth as you discover and read books featured in these pages. They include a new volume in the Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner and two new books from Peter Selg, one of our most prolific and bestselling authors. We are also pleased to present a new book from Marie-Laure Valandro, the author of Camino Walk (featured in our Spring Reader).

I am heartily grateful to you for your continued support and friendship in every purchase from us and hope you find inspiration in this issue of Steiner & Spirit.

All very best wishes,
Gene Gollogly, President & CEO, SteinerBooks

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Note: Owing to increasing costs of printing paper catalogs, the 2010 issue of Steiner & Spirit returns to the smaller size (6 x 10.5 inches) of several years ago. It is our hope that each upcoming catalogs will nonetheless prove enjoyable and useful to our readers. Remember, a full, up-to-date list of our books is always here on our website.

Anytime you wish to find a specific title, follow THIS LINK (also in the main menu under "Books"). You can also find our complete list of authors by following THIS LINK (also in the main menu to the left under "Books").

You can view our new Steiner & Spirit catalog in two ways. An Adobe Flash version is HERE (1 MB). If you wish to download a PDF version to view anytime, click HERE (2 MB) and save the file when it opens in your browser or Adobe Reader.

This issue of Steiner & Spirit features two excerpts from new books.

The first is Peter Selg's preface to his newest book from SteinerBooks, Unbornness: Human Pre-existence and the Journey toward Birth.

“Unbornness,” Rudolf Steiner says, is “the other side of eternity.” But in today’s human consciousness, “unbornness” plays only a marginal part. “We have no idea what we are lacking in this regard.” What is obvious is that this “lack” of insight (or even the lack of questions in this area) seriously affects not only our self-knowledge, but also what we do and refrain from doing in our handling of different situations in life. The field of prenatal diagnostics and intervention appears in a wholly different light when we understand that in the development of each child (including the embryonic-fetal phase) a human individuality is working to enter into and shape a meaningful earthly existence. Throughout the world, innumerable abortions of these journeys take place, carried out because of imagined or actual physical circumstances, initiated by physicians or parents without consideration or respect for the will to incarnate of this individuality, who embarked on its journey in spite of the prevailing obstacles, and maybe even in full knowledge of them. Scientific medicine claims to be free from any particular ideology. Yet, its diagnostic and therapeutic methods obviously rest on premises that are rarely called into question. These premises have to do with the image and essence of the human being, as well as the whole concept of the human body and biography, and therefore also with the origin of the human being.

The second is from the Christopher Bamford's preface to What Is Necessary in These Urgent Times, the most recent addition to The Collected Works of Rudolf Steiner (CW 196), never before available in English. A major theme of this lecture course is community:

Instead of seeking new sources of morality in new, spiritually fruitful worldviews, people ask: What is to be the source of a new morality? They answer: Having power is an indispensable means for achieving something good in the world; therefore, you should strive to gain the necessary power (if you do not already possess it) for doing good. People would like to have something good to do in the world, and they advise one another to seek the power to do that good. Another justification for this new ethics goes as follows: With the power you already possess, you can do some good; therefore, you should always use the power you have for the achievement of good.

First, however, you must have some good to do. First you must be able to recognize what is good! The advice that people give is the opposite of what spiritual science must spread throughout the new human civilization. For spiritual science has nothing to do with trying to establish something on the basis of power. You can base something on that foundation only when you are working with a group of people collectively. When one human being stands before another, you cannot establish anything on the basis of power: you can establish something only on the basis of what develops in the human being, so that the other person has some worth. We all have a worth to discover and develop within ourselves that will allow us to accomplish something for the sake of humanity. And each of us must simultaneously develop a receptivity within ourselves that allows us to recognize this worth in others.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Steiner & Spirit!

Let us know what you think of our catalogs and website. Your opinion matters to us. If you have comments or questions, please send an email to friends@steinerbooks.org.

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