Puddles from a Drooling Mind: ...a Quest for Meaning through an Informed Faith - Softcover

Stemmle, Denis Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496103998 ISBN 13: 9781496103994

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014

Synopsis

…a Quest for Meaning through an Informed Faith: This book is for people who have more questions than they have faith. Most books on religion are filled with dogmas disguised as facts, and guidance on how to interpret things – all targeted to people who already believe. Puddles from a Drooling Mind takes a different approach. It says it is OK to have serious unresolved questions about religion, and not be sure of what you believe. It offers unique appeal for people who realize that blind faith, the faith they were perhaps born into and raised with, doesn’t quite do it for them anymore. Readers will explore the path to an informed faith, which involves daring to ask important questions and searching for better answers than the prepackaged ones.   Informed faith leads to a greater sense of fulfillment, despite irresolvable questions associated with traditional faiths. Denis Joseph Stemmle’s own spiritual journey illustrates the elements of informed faith through personal stories, impressions, and conversations. This work neither proselytizes nor rejects the premises of traditional faith. The author offers a number of important and sometimes controversial points, including: • Each of us sees our God not as He is, but as we are. • If you don’t see my faith lived out in my relationships with the people I am closest to, then my religion counts for nothing. • Righteousness is a barrier to insight: It is a lifelong challenge to discover and question my own righteousness. • Sometimes informed faith requires understanding the principles behind the rules, while questioning how the rules are applied. The roots of an informed faith are based on understanding what Jesus actually taught, what his values were, and how he applied them. • Life is too short to waste it on bad liturgies. If liturgies do what they are supposed to do, they affect how I live my life.    Puddles from a Drooling Mind aims to challenge your thinking and stir things up…and then invites you to reflect on the questions offered in each chapter and use them in daily journaling or in group discussions.

About this title

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR For the past forty years, Denis Joseph Stemmle has been engaged in helping people discover truths about themselves and find ways to live their lives with more fulfillment, satisfaction, and accomplishment. In hundreds of speaking engagements to groups in the USA, Canada, England, and Ireland, his style has been both gentle and challenging. That style involves telling stories about his own journey, his discoveries, his barriers and roadblocks, his breakthroughs and frustrations. He then invites his listeners to reflect and encourages them make their own discoveries. His principal focus in these speaking engagements has been to bring energy into relationships and leadership. Stemmle’s journey started with presenting talks, in partnership with his wife Dee, at over a hundred Marriage Encounter Weekends, and has evolved into training couples and priests to present on these weekends by going deeper in their own relationships. Denis and Dee led a team to create a training weekend called “Leading through Relationship” for new leadership people in volunteer organizations to help them be more effective. He presented this experience six times to the leadership in Marriage Encounter, and later in his own parish—and trained others to continue presenting it. He was instrumental in creating and then presented a number of other parish-based experiences such as “A Journey of Discipleship,” “Using your Strengths,” and “Evenings for Married Couples” for small groups—and trained others to present these programs as well. He and Dee published numerous magazine articles on finding fulfillment through investments in relationships; and created, edited, and contributed articles to fourteen editions of a newsletter called Energizing Marriage. In one chapter from this book, he addresses some of the specific ways he has tried to use informed faith within the context of his job as Vice President of Engineering, leading a group of over 450 directors, managers, scientists, and engineers. He also has over 140 US Patents granted in his name. He is now retired.

Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496103998
• ISBN 13: 9781496103994
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 282