For centuries, oneirophants have sought to understand the mystery of dreams: what they tell us about ourselves, the future, and our needs and aspirations. In this collection of books from Jungian psychologists and published by Chiron Publications, which is distributed by Lantern, various authors examine the meaning of dreams and explore the symbols that often appear in them and are reflected in the outside world.

In Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams, Eugene T. Gendlin describes how your body's reactions to dreams can teach you what the dream is speaking to you. First, you'll discover what the dream is about, and secondly, you'll learn something new from the dream that will aid your own development.

Animals are of great symbolic significance to us: both when we're asleep and when we're conscious. In Animal Life in Nature, Myth, and Dreams, Elizabeth Caspari connects the world of real, living animals with the symbolic world of animal images in human thought. This book, fully illustrated with color photos, is a study of animals: their natural history, mythology, folklore, and religious significance around the world as well as their role in our lives, dreams, and everyday language. In The Archetypal Symbolism of Animals, Barbara Hannah, a student and close friend of C.G. Jung, presents lectures on the symbolic meaning of several domestic and wild animals, and illustrates how our animal nature can become the psychic source of renewal and natural wholeness.

Back in the early 1980s, being a vegetarian was a lot harder than it is more than thirty years later. If you don't know, just ask Alex Hershaft, founder of FARM, and Mark Braunstein, author of Radical Vegetarianism, a book as nuggety, nutritious, and nutty as some of the meatloafs that no doubt graced the tables of veggies back then.

Actually, Radical Vegetarianism makes a strong case not simply for vegetarianism, but for raw foodism, and for all of us, however we might name our diet, to examine our food choices playfully but profoundly, for none of us is pure. Another book to do just that is Sistah Vegan, which explores a plant-based diet in the context of race, class, women's body image and gender as a whole, and a raft of other issues that remind us that being vegetarian or vegan can never simply be simply about which animal products you leave out of your diet.

Flummoxed about moving from omnivorousness to vegetarianism, let alone veganism? Want someone to be your cheerleader and BFF as you make the transition? Then Donna Beaudoin, a.k.a. Sister Vegetarian, is right there for you. Sister Vegetarian's 31 Days of Drama-Free Living is so fresh that it's like a bariatic chamberful of pure oxygen for your mind and body. She's got recipes, mantras, and a whole bunch of good ideas to get you from meat to veg, and then veg to vegan. Check it out!

If you're completely baffled about just what it is that vegetarians or vegans eat, then Lantern has a bunch of books that will help you embrace the plant-based diet without having to tell anyone that you've become a (sssh!) vegetarian. You'll see them listed below as images.

Too often we celebrate the mind and the spirit and forget that we are incarnate beings, merely but magnificently mortal. While it's true that our flesh will ultimately fail and die, our passage on this earth is nevertheless contained within what the Anglo-Saxons accurately and evocatively called the "bone house," which in spite of how much we ignore it, abuse it, or forget we have it, remains incredibly resilient and resourceful for much of our lives. That's why we need to protect and cherish it, and that's why Lantern Books publishes titles that can help you do just that.

In Condom Sense, Dr. Monica Sweeney, director of the New York City Bureau of HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control, makes it clear that the AIDS epidemic is not over, not only in Africa and Asia, but in North America and Europe, where a new generation of young men and women are returning to sex without condoms, resulting in a dramatic increase in HIV cases after years of decline. Her message is clear and strong: The best protection is prevention, with latex condoms. Condom Sense uncompromisingly focuses on the reality of human lives and tells you how to stay safe.

It is one thing to want to act; it is another thing to take action; and it is an another thing still to act consciously to bring about lasting change.

Sometimes the most effective activism takes place during ordinary encounters with family, friends, and even strangers—each interaction a chance to educate by example, embodying our ethical beliefs as best we can. In Living Among Meat Eaters, Carol Adams helps us become more aware of the message we're sending, with self-tests, strategies, meditations on vegetarianism, and tips for dining out and entertaining at home when meat eaters are on the invite list.

In Consciousness in Action: The Power of Beauty, Love, and Courage in a Violent Time, Andrew Beath has gathered the wisdom of several leading spiritual activists (John Mack, Julia Butterfly Hill, and others) to show how right mind and right livelihood can bring about enormous change. The activists talk about aligning their spiritual values with their wish to bring about social and political change.

Will Tuttle in The World Peace Diet: Eating for Spiritual Health and Social Harmony offers a powerful and polemical call for us to recognize that our choices not only impact the lives of others but also make us healthy or sick. We can no longer separate our lives from the lives of the beings who live with us on this planet, and, conversely, working for the good of others is working for the good of ourselves.

For too long, science and religion have seen themselves in opposition.

Yet, as Harvard-educated theologian Gary Kowalski argues in Science and the Search for God, many of the ills of the modern world, from the rise of fundamentalist intolerance to secular society's spiritual emptiness, stem from the mistaken view that science and faith are antagonists rather than natural allies. Both science and faith, the author suggests, now compel us to move beyond materialism toward an understanding of the world that includes the realities of consciousness and spirit.

Someone who understands deeply the consonance of science and religious practice is Glen Peter Kezwer, who is not only an accomplished physicist but an intensive meditator. Using modern scientific analysis, he shows in Meditation, Oneness, and Physics that the descriptions of reality as put forth by quantum physics correlate with those altered states of consciousness achieved in meditation. He further describes how meditation can be incorporated into your own life to bring the benefits of good health, happiness, clear thinking, peace of mind, self-sufficiency, and fearlessness.

From age-old scourges like smallpox and tuberculosis to emerging threats like AIDS and SARS, our interactions with animals have played a pivotal role as the source of human disease.

Before there was swine flu (H1N1), there was bird flu (H5N1). In spite of the visibility of H1N1, leading public health authorities still predict as inevitable a pandemic of influenza, triggered by bird flu and expected to lead to millions of deaths around the globe. The influenza virus has existed for millions of years as an innocuous intestinal virus of wild ducks. What turned a harmless waterborne duck virus into a killer? In Bird Flu, Dr. Michael Greger traces the human role in the evolution of this virus, whose humble beginnings belie its transformation into a killer mutant strain with the potential to become as ferocious as Ebola and as contagious as the common cold. In the face of the coming pandemic, Dr. Greger reveals what we can do to protect our families and what human society to can do to reduce the likelihood of such catastrophes in the future.

Lantern would like to believe that our books are of interest to anyone—no matter their color, creed, or sexual orientation. However, Black History Month is a good heuristic to draw attention to titles by African-American authors.

Unlike those in so many anthologies, Sistah Vegan's two dozen voices are not only very diverse in terms of the educational, social, and economic backgrounds, but they have markedly different—and sometimes completely antithetical—perspectives. In other words, the book is like a large and rambunctious conversation between friends who have no trouble calling each other out, but remain respectful and supporting.

Another book that I relished is Sister Vegetarian's 31 Days of Drama-Free Living by Donna Beaudoin who for a full month provides personal stories, practical tips, mouthwatering recipes, and empowering thoughts that will help you avoid the drama and negativity of family members, coworkers, and your own doubts as you set about supercharging your day by eating healthily, exercising with energy and joy, and becoming aware of your own strength.

By turns exuberant, mordant, self-aware and sharply observed, Joseph Holland's From Harlem with Love is part memoir of thirty years of activism on behalf of the dispossessed, part history of a storied neighborhood, and part celebration of the culture that emerged in the early parts of the twentieth century from this part of Manhattan: a culture that would reshape America.

All told, these books offer a compelling vision of a diverse and vital community engaged in finding a better way forward for themselves and other Americans.

After a twenty-year period as abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, Thomas Keating moved to St. Benedict's Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, called by the late Fr. Theophane Boyd, the "Magic Monastery" because of the beauty of its surroundings, the peace inside its walls, and the extraordinary transformations that take place there.

During his time at Snowmass, Fr. Thomas was deeply involved in interreligious dialogue (see www.monasticdialog.com). Over a twenty-year period, a series of interreligious dialogues took place at Snowmass, the proceedings of which were kept private so that the participants could explore freely the wealth of their own traditions and dialogue from the heart about the differences and similarities between their paths of wisdom. These dialogues have now been captured in The Common Heart. Participants include Fr. Thomas, Roshi Bernie Glassman, Swami Atmarupananda, Dr. Ibrahim Gamard, Imam Bilal Hyde, Pema Chödrön, Rabbi Henoch Dov Hoffman, and others.

In 1996, a group of monastics from the Buddhist, Hindu, and Christian traditions met at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky to share their experiences of the monastic life. This meeting took place for two reasons. The first was Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, who resided at Gethsemani, and pioneered interreligious dialogue, when he met His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1968. It was perhaps partly out of that curiosity and faithfulness to the idea of dialogue that the Vatican started an organization eventually called Monastic Interreligious Dialogue (MID) in the mid-1970s to encourage continued dialogue between those faiths with monastic traditions (Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism), an effort that continues to this day.

Lantern has published a number of titles on interreligious dialogue, including Islam Is. . ., The Common Heart, The Attentive Voice, and two books about Swami Abhishiktananda/Henri Le Saux (God's Harp String and Witness to the Fullness of Light).

What can we say about the Holocaust, and can we in any way talk of it in the same breath as the routine slaughter of billions of animals on today's factory farms?

In a thoughtful and thought-provoking contribution to the study of animals and the Holocaust, The Holocaust and the Henmaid's Tale, Karen Davis makes the case that significant parallels can, and must, be drawn between the Holocaust and the institutionalized abuse of billions of animals in factory farms. Carefully setting forth the conditions that must be met when one instance of oppression is used metaphorically to illuminate another, Davis demonstrates the value of such comparisons in exploring the invisibility of the oppressed, historical and hidden suffering, the idea that some groups were "made" to serve others through suffering and sacrificial death, and other concepts that reveal powerful connections between animal and human experience, as well as human traditions and tendencies of which we all should be aware.

In Eternal Treblinka, scholar Charles Patterson shows the links between the Chicago meat-packing industry, the assembly lines of Henry Ford, and Hitler's embrace of mechanized slaughter and eugenics perfected on animals: a deadly combination that led to the killing of over six million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and communists. Thoughtfully showing the ideology of purity and dehumanization that led to the Holocaust, Patterson reveals how the fascist mentality exists even today in the destruction of life unworthy of life in the factory farms of today.

Many of us want to create change in the world, but face tremendous obstacles in getting our message out. The powers that be have vastly more resources at their disposal than activists do. But some of our authors have discovered how to shift the balance of power.

In Strategic Action for Animals, Melanie Joy explains how to use strategy to exponentially increase the effectiveness of activism for animals. Drawing on diverse movements and sources, she offers tried and true tactics and explains how to address the most common problems that weaken activists' efforts. Matt Ball and Bruce Friedrich's The Animal Activist's Handbook builds a ground-up case for reasoned, impassioned, and joyous activism that makes the most difference possible. They also suggest a variety of ways to live a meaningful life through effective and efficient advocacy.

For thirty years, Fr. Thomas Keating, OCSO, has been reclaiming the Christian meditative tradition that he calls Centering Prayer.

It takes its roots from a number of sources: the ancient prayer practices of the Christian contemplative heritage, notably the Fathers and Mothers of the Desert; Lectio Divina, (praying the scriptures); The Cloud of Unknowing; St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. With his fellow Trappist monks, Fr. William Meninger and Fr. Basil Pennington, and through his organization, Contemplative Outreach, Thomas Keating has shown that contemporary Christianity can be an enlivening, mystical experience, both free of dogma and deeply personal.

The fundamental transformation of Centering Prayer occurs when you enter what Thomas Keating calls "the inner room," a concept taken from Matthew 6:6 ("But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you"—NIV.) When you enter the room, God, acting as a divine therapist, begins to peel away the layers of emotional programming that have kept you from intimacy with God and uncovers the authentic self that has been hidden or repressed. All of the resistances, pathologies, and prejudices you have about the divine and your own self are lovingly removed, leaving you able to enjoy what Paul the Apostle calls "the fruits and gifts of the Spirit."

Much of what makes weight loss work is having the right attitude: a feeling of joy in one's life and not the dread of deprivation. A case in point is Norris Chumley, author of The Joy of Weight Loss. He'd been on virtually every diet, and they'd all failed. He tipped the scales at the 400 pounds time and time again. He felt hopeless, and, in rare glimpses of honesty, secretly admitted that he was slowly committing suicide. His book tells the dramatic story of how he turned his life around, discovered joy, happiness, and permanent freedom from obesity and offers a straightforward way for you to manage your weight. Likewise Victoria Moran. As she recounts in The Love-Powered Diet, she yo-yo'd in weight, until she realized that she had to love the body she had to get to the body she wanted.

Donna Beaudoin had tried to go vegetarian over and over again, only to be brought down by her own doubts and family, friends, and co-workers, who told her that she'd be giving up her culture, her looks, and a whole host of nonsense ("drama!") if she stopped eating meat. She finally decided to chart her own course and the result is Sister Vegetarian's 31 Days of Drama-Free Living, a book that will take you day by day through the process of changing your life. Donna (a.k.a. Sister Vegetarian) lost forty pounds, regained her health, and is now full of zest and zip.

For more on Norris Chumley, click here. For more on Victoria Moran, click here. For more on Donna Beaudoin, click here

The radical premise of Christianity, too often forgotten in our anthropocentric age, is that it is the the world, and not simply humankind, that is redeemed through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This means that the eschatalogical hope expressed by Isaiah that the wolf will dwell with the lamb and that the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord is not an idle wish that we might be nice to animals and nature. It is that all creatures and the earth itself will be transformed by lovingkindness into lovingkindness. Such a radical promise should challenge Christians to question whether the Biblical mandate of humankind's dominion over the animals and the earth should continue to lead to cruelty, exploitation, and indifference.

One of the great spiritual mandates of Judaism is "tikkun olam," which means "to heal the world."

From God's first injunction, "Behold, I have given you every herb yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed, to you it shall be for food," (Gen. 1:29) the Hebrew Bible offers countless examples of how God intends a compassionate and caring attitude toward animals, our health, and the well-being of the planet. In Judaism and Vegetarianism, professor emeritus in New York Richard Schwartz shows how respect for animals and the environment can revitalize one's Jewish faith, while in Judaism and Global Survival he argues that a rediscovery of basic Jewish teachings and mandates, such as to seek peace and justice, to love our neighbors as ourselves, and to act as co-workers with God in protecting and preserving the earth, can build a better world.

For more on Judaism and vegetarianism, click here.