Daniel A. Helminiak - Books By Helminiak

Books By Helminiak

• Spirituality for Our Global Community: Beyond Traditional Religion to a World at Peace (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008, ISBN cloth 0-7425-5917-3 / 978-0-7425-5917-2, paper 0-7425-5918-1 / 978-0-7425-2918-9). A middle path between secularism and religion: "spiritual but not religious"—and this popular book explains what this adage means. It builds on the spiritual nature of our common humanity, not claimed knowledge of God. It emphasizes wholesome living here and now on planet Earth, not life in heaven or some reincarnation to come, yet it opens seamlessly onto a range of religions and belief in God. Spiritual for religious believers and non-sectarian for secular society, it suggests a framework of beliefs and ethics to structure a global community.

• The Transcended Christian: Spiritual Lessons for the Twenty-first Century (Alyson Books, 2007, ISBN 155583-860-X). What do you do when you outgrow your religion? This popular presentation of Christianity in a pluralistic, secular, global society offers lessons learned by religious outcasts in the struggle to remain honest and Christian. It applies Helminiak's psychology of spirituality specifically to Christianity.

• Sex and the Sacred: Gay Identity and Spiritual Growth (Haworth / Harrison Park, 2006, ISBN 1-56023-342-7). This integration of sexuality and spirituality uses homosexuality as the telling test case. It introduces a fully psychological / humanistic approach to spirituality and later addresses specific religious issues including sexual ethics, Fundamentalism, and Vatican teaching.

• Meditation without Myth: What I Wish They'd Taught Me in Church about Prayer, Meditation, and the Quest for Peace (Crossroad Publishing Co., 2005, ISBN 0-8245-2308-3). This is a popular three-part presentation of Helminiak's psychology of spirituality applied to the specific topic, meditation—practically, how to do it; psychologically, why it works; and religiously, what it means.

• What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality (Alamo Square Press, 1994, 2000 ISBN 1-886360-09-X). First released in 1994 and published in a significantly up-dated "Millennium Edition" in 2000, this short book is Helminiak's best known and overshadows his other, and probably ultimately more significant, contributions. As of mid-2008, the book has sold almost 100,000 copies and in addition has been published in Portuguese (Brazil), Polish, Spanish (Spain and Colombia), Korean, French, and Czech. It popularizes recent scholarship that understands the biblical texts within their original historical and cultural settings. In it he argues that, taken for what the texts originally intended, far from condemning, the Bible is basically indifferent to same-sex relationships, as was most of the ancient world. The prohibition of Leviticus 18:22, against "man lying with man as with a woman", pertains solely to anal penetration, not to other male-male sexual practices, and rests on concern about ancient Jewish ritual taboos ("purity"), not hygiene, idolatrous rituals, opposition to Gentile practices, or ethical beliefs about the nature of sex or the complementarity of the sexes. The most important Christian text on same-sex behavior, Romans 1:26-27, refers back to Leviticus ("God gave them up to impurity", Romans 1:24) and, following Jesus, dismisses the purity requirements of the "Old Law" as irrelevant for Christians ("Nothing is unclean in itself", Romans 14:14). The "unnatural" of Romans 1:26 is a mistranslation of Paul's popular usage of the otherwise technical Stoic Greek term para physin, which, without ethical implications, should read "atypical" or "non-standard."

• Religion and the Human Sciences: An Approach via Spirituality (State University of New York Press, 1998, ISBN cloth 0-7914-3805-8, paper 0-7914-3806-6). A technical, methodological companion-volume to The Human Core of Spirituality, it presents spirituality as the missing link between psychology and theology, and it makes comparisons with the Evangelical Christian "integration project", Don Browning's "revised critical correlation", and Ken Wilber's perennial, now called "integral", philosophy.

• The Human Core of Spirituality: Mind as Psyche and Spirit (State University of New York Press, 1996, ISBN cloth 0-7914-2949-0, paper 0-7914-2950-4). This is the first of Helminiak's two-volume technical study of the psychology of spirituality grounded in Bernard Lonergan's analysis of consciousness or spirit. This elaboration of the spiritual facet of our common humanity is relevant to the human sciences and all religions. It includes a long chapter on sexuality as an instance of the importance of the body for spiritual integration.

• Spiritual Development: An Interdisciplinary Study (Loyola University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-8294-0530-5, out of print). A three-part technical study—psychological, theological, and specifically Christian—of the meaning of spiritual growth, including a delineation of its stages in line with contemporary theory and research on human development. It also provides a technical definition of holiness, an elaboration of the relationship of divine activity to the functioning of human nature, and an important chapter on the role of the Holy Spirit in Christian salvation.

• The Same Jesus: A Contemporary Christology (Loyola University Press, 1986, ISBN 0-8294-0521-6, out of print). This is a comprehensive study of Jesus and Christian belief about him in light of current biblical studies. It summarizes the biblical research and the teaching of the early church councils. Then it builds on the decree of the Council of Chalcedon—not only the oft quoted teaching that Christ was "one person in two natures", but also the under-appreciated remainder of that phrase, "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation"—and presents a completely orthodox, contemporary understanding that highlights Jesus' heretofore neglected humanity as his divinely saving link with all people.