John Gray, Ph.D., is the best-selling non-fiction author of the last decade. His blockbuster book Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, and a host of subsequent titles, made him a preeminent national authority on gender roles in modern society. His moving chapter reflects on his seminars with maximum-security prisoners, demonstrating the possibility that love and forgiveness can flourish even during the greatest of tragedies.

Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, has a keen eye for the trends and values of Western society, and has written and lectured extensively on these topics as he shapes the cultural debate both in Great Britain and other countries. He has read widely in Islam as well as other religions, and his essay on reawakening the sacred amongst the noise of the Information Age is informed by a profound synthesis of Eastern and Western thought.

Fritjof Capra, Ph.D., is an influential voice of the New Science, which his best-selling book The Tao of Physics brought to widespread popular awareness. He writes passionately of the urgent need to discover the environment practically and personally, and to discover the inter-relationships that surround us. He provides a blueprint for how to teach ecology meaningfully to children, in an open system with a cyclical exchange of knowledge.

Building on the ideas in her book of the same name, Caroline Myss, Ph.D., describes how the simplest of acts of compassion can have effects on others out of all proportion to their apparent size. Drawing on hundreds of case histories taken from her recent work, she tells stories about accidents or suicides averted, sometimes by an act as seemingly insignificant as a caring smile. She describes how getting in touch with our intuition leads us inevitably into a life of service, and how applying our gifts to the circumstances at hand is far more important than saving “the world.”