"David's new book, Soulful Spirituality, needs to be read, dialogued with, and then used to overhaul our weak and anemic engagement with the real world. In a culture full of escape-this-world spiritualities on the one hand and narcissistic spiritualities on the other, David Benner says, 'absolutely not!' and then loudly and powerfully links our spirituality to the exciting lifelong task of becoming more fully and deeply human. David's identification of things like toxic spirituality will provide welcome hope to the growing number of people in 'religious recovery' who are on the spiritual and human journey but are simply worn out with the narrow approaches so common today. He has a deep commitment to us as embodied beings and as such helps us attend to an embodied spirituality. He gets at tough concepts like desire, longing, and restlessness, and few have dealt with the issue of ego, its role, and its limits as well as he does in this book. If you are ready to dig in, ready to really change and experience transformation, then by all means get this book. And then buy nine more copies to pass out to friends for a dialogue group! We need David Benner's stuff in our airspace. I am going to spread the word, and I hope you will too."
—Ron Martoia, author, speaker, and founder of velocityculture.com and ttTribe.com

"In Soulful Spirituality David Benner has done it again! In this profound, highly readable book that plumbs the depths, he integrates his impressive gifts in psychology and theology with his own lived spirituality as a lifelong seeker. To immerse oneself in Soulful Spirituality is the next best thing to sitting down with him for a transforming, intimate, and enlivening conversation."
—Margaret Guenther, professor emerita of ascetical theology and former director of the Center for Christian Spirituality, General Theological Seminary

"David Benner offers us a masterpiece of understanding and guidance for mature, fully alive human living that is grounded in the depth of spiritual and contemplative awareness and practice and is further informed by his psychological knowledge and long experience attending to his own and other people's calls to authentic spiritual and human becoming. His questions and suggestions at the end of each chapter provide helpful ways to connect his insights and practices with readers' lives. The profound and fiercely honest human and spiritual wisdom found here will leave the reader more in touch with both the impediments to full human aliveness that need to be attended to and the possibilities of such aliveness, which are aided by the many concrete spiritual practices that he offers. He challenges our settling for a narrow, repressed way of life and spirituality and calls us to become more truly alive in every dimension of our being: body, soul, and spirit."
—Tilden Edwards, founder and senior fellow, Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, Washington DC

"Anything David Benner writes is worth reading, and this is no exception. Read and be fed with real food!"
—Richard Rohr, OFM, Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Now Featured in the Patheos Book Club
Spirituality and the Awakening Self
The Sacred Journey of Transformation
By David G. Benner