Author: JCS Editor

Reviewed by Ariel Evan Mayse, this review discusses Marcia Falk’s Night of Beginnings, a reimagined Passover Haggadah designed to inspire contemplative practice. Falk combines poetic liturgy, gender-inclusive language, and mystical reflections to offer new interpretations of traditional Jewish texts. She emphasizes the importance of personal and communal transformation, focusing on connection, humility, and compassion rather than power and exclusion. Through her creative blessings, storytelling, and visual art, Falk invites readers to experience the Passover Seder as a dynamic ritual filled with beauty, renewal, and spiritual depth.

Reviewed by Ariel Evan Mayse, this review explores how urban green spaces can promote mental well-being through intentional design informed by neuroscience, as discussed by Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo in Neuroscience for Designing Green Spaces: Contemplative
Landscapes, published in 2023. The book introduces the Contemplative Landscape Model, a framework identifying seven features that enhance contemplative experiences in built environments. Mayse discusses why the book is a significant contribution to the field of Contemplative Studies, and what more there is to be done.

After a century and a half of focus on Buddhist doctrine, academic attention is increasingly being paid to practice. What remains undertheorized, however, is the relation between the two. An example of this is the idea that tantric practice is simply a ritual technology, separate and autonomous from doctrinal formulation. This is a persisting academic trope, one that conceptualizes doctrine and practice dichotomously.

The religious or spiritual value of contemplative practices and the use of psychedelics is not intrinsic to experiences obtained through them and is instead relational—a function of how they alter consciousness. In support of that claim, I first present a nonreductive, nondualist Buddhist account of consciousness that calls critically into question the merits of both physicalist and phenomenalist reductionism in exploring the meditative and psychedelic alterations of consciousness.