Positive Psychology and Secular Ethics: Good Reads

Lately, I have been reading for many hours each day as I recover and heal my knee from my fall last Sunday (10 Sep 2023).  Here are some of the better books I have read:

The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time, Do Everything Better.  By Thatcher Wine. Little Brown Spark, 2021, index, notes, 263 pages.  VSCL, Hardbound + FVRLibrary.

If you want good ideas, tips, techniques, exercises, and methods for enabling yourself to focus, concentrate, and fully engage yourself in specific tasks in your daily life then read: "The Twelve Monotasks: Do One Thing at a Time, Do Everything Better" by Thatcher Wine, 2021. He gives specific recommendations for "monotasking" in the areas of reading, walking, listening, sleeping, eating, travel, learning, teaching, playing, seeing, creating, and thinking. A fine book in positive psychology!

Secular Faith: How Culture Has Trumped Religion in American Politics.  By Mark A. Smith.  University of Chicago Press, 2015, index, notes, 287 pages. FVRLibrary.

A sociological and historical study about how the secular society in America has moved away from traditional religious anti-progressive and oppressive values regarding slavery, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, and women's rights.  A very good analysis and careful research into how the Christian religion supported slavery, rejected divorce, persecuted homosexuals, rejected birth control, and treated women unfairly and denied women rights; and how secular compromises changed our views and laws regarding these issues and practices in American society over the past three centuries. A respect for individual liberties, rights, and freedom are more popular in American secular culture in 2023. For example, despite the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition, and fundamentalist "family values" agendas in the ongoing Culture Wars; all States now have "no-fault" divorce options, and these religious groups these days place a low priority on trying to restrict or make divorce illegal or persecute divorcees, as they did in the past.

The Existentialist's Survival Guide;  How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age. By Gordon Marino. Harper One, 2018, bibliography, notes, 260 pages. FVRLibrary.

A philosopher and librarian and boxer digs deeply into real life issues such as anxiety, depression, despair, death, authenticity, faith, morality, and love.  Strong on Kierkegaard and similar authors. Hope, courage, and honesty but little emphasis of facile happiness. Existentialism has a gloomy demeanor, and life can be very gloomy.

Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. By Jean-Paul Sartre.  Translated by Sarah Richmond.  Washington Square Press, 1943, 2018, bibliography, index, 853 pages.  VSCL, Paperback. 

This complicated, obtuse, lengthy, difficult, and noted book will take me four months to read and study.  I have read a number of essays and fictional books by Sartre, and studied him in college in 1964, but have never challenged myself to study his magnum opus until 2023.  I'm not sure if I am up to understanding his complex views in my old age, but I will try. 

Aging Well

Aging Well

"Ten Ways to Inspire People to Keep Fit:  Be a role model; make fitness fun; be both active and productive; make workouts short and sweet; extol the benefits; train for a charity event together; set short-term goals; offer to be a workout partner; use inspirational music; don't preach, lecture or nag. "
-  American Council on Exercise  

 

“There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”
-  Sophia Loren  

 

"So far as motivational status is concerned, healthy people have sufficiently gratified their basic needs for safety, belongingness, love, respect and self-esteem so that they are motivated primarily by trends to self-actualization (defined as ongoing actualization of potentials, capacitates and talents, as fulfillment of mission (or call, fate, destiny, or vocation), as a fuller knowledge of, and acceptance of, the person's own intrinsic nature, as an unceasing trend toward unity, integration or synergy within the person. .. These healthy people are there defined by describing their clinically observed characteristics.  These are:
1.  Superior perception of reality.
2.  Increased acceptance of self, of others and of nature.
3.  Increased spontaneity.
4.  Increase in problem-centering.
5.  Increased detachment and desire for privacy.
6.  Increased autonomy, and resistance to enculturation.
7.  Greater freshness of appreciation, and richness of emotional reaction.
8.  Higher frequency of peak experiences.
9.  Increased identification with the human species.
10.  Changed and improved interpersonal relations.
11.  More democratic character structure.
12.  Greatly increased creativeness.
13.  Certain changes in the value system."
-  Toward a Psychology of Being.   Abraham Maslow.  New Jersey, Van Nostrand, 1962.  3rd Edition, Wiley, 1998.  320 pages.  ISBN: 0471293091. pp.23-24