Author Description

**Literary Titan Silver Book Award **5-stars from Reader's Favorite **Honorable Mention at San Francisco Book Festival In These Dry Bones, award-winning author Dr. Josh R. Ritter weaves together wisdom teachings and philosophical insights from Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism to explore the beatitudes through the lens of the wisdom tradition. On this creative journey into the heart of the beatitudes, he offers spiritual and wisdom-oriented insights, and he presents us with many different and differing theological interpretations of the beatitudes and other pieces of the biblical narrative. The beatitudes, Ritter suggests, are often misunderstood and even ignored because they seem to defy clear interpretation, and of course, they do defy interpretation. This is intentional, he says, because the beatitudes are Christian koans. Koans are short, paradoxical teachings intended to bring the hearer out of their "logical" mind and into something deeper, an experience with reality as it is. Koans are most often associated with certain lineages of Zen Buddhist teaching, but Jewish rabbis also often present their listeners with paradoxical sayings (midrash aggadah), often called parables, to challenge their audience to engage in deeper understandings of God. Through the lens of the spiritual imagination, Ritter explores, re-imagines, and reframes various ways to interpret the beatitudes as a type of eight-fold path of spiritual development. His reflections on the beatitudes use multiple writing styles and span multiple years of writing, practice, and research. What he reveals to us is that the true beauty of the beatitudes is their openness to rich interpretations and deep wisdom. Just as Jesus understood scripture as a deep and living well of beauty and wisdom, this book approaches the beatitudes with the same understanding. Within Judaism, it is often said that there are 70 faces of Torah, which means that there is endl