Now Featured in the Patheos Book Club
Streams of Contentment
Lessons I Learned on My Uncle's Farm
By Robert J. Wicks
With over 200,000 books sold, Robert J. Wicks, the bestselling author of Riding the Dragon, applies lessons learned as a city boy spending summers on his family's farm to the complex and hectic reality of contemporary life.
For the first time, author, speaker, psychologist, and spiritual guide Wicks opens a window into his personal life, relating stories of the people and places that have shaped his spiritual perspective in youth and early in his professional career. Streams of Contentment: Lessons I Learned on My Uncle's Farm takes as its focus Wicks's experiences as a New York City boy spending summers on his uncle's farm in the Catskills. He highlights the resonance between life in the country and the insights of spiritual writers on gratefulness and mindfulness, concluding: "The crucial calling for me now is to be content with who and where I already am."
With characteristic charm and insight, Wicks offers a simple prescription for finding contentment: have low expectations and high hopes, recognize that a little silence and solitude is no small thing, and discover the surprising power of humility. He also includes thirty brief reflections and simple practices for discovering contentment. In fifteen poignant, sometimes humorous, and always instructive lessons, Wicks builds on the insights first developed in Riding the Dragon to demonstrate how contentment is found through simplicity, gratitude, and compassion.
For more, visit the book's website here.
Praise for Streams of Contentment
"Commonsense spirituality."
"This is commonsense spirituality that unfortunately is no longer common sense. Bob Wicks makes it so!"
—Richard Rohr, O.F.M.
Center for Action and Contemplation
"Wicks's signature mix of storytelling and spirituality at its best."
"This is Robert Wicks's signature mix of storytelling and spirituality at its best. Within these charming chapters, Wicks translates the wisdom and insights that come with simple living. With lucid prose, he articulates the teaching moments that come to us when we least expect them."
—Therese J. Borchard
Associate Editor
Psych Central
"A delightfully written blueprint."
"A delightfully written blueprint for developing and polishing our personality into the beautiful person we were intended to be, and in the process prepare ourselves, no matter who we are, or how insignificant we may think we are, to make a difference in this world just by being our unique and beautiful self."
—Joseph F. Girzone
Author of the Joshua series
About the Author
Robert J. Wicks
Website: http://www.robertjwicks.com/
Robert J. Wicks strives to open people who are used to giving to the miracle of receiving. He accomplishes this goal by marrying sound psychology and basic spiritual truths that set the stage for profound personal transformation. A popular presenter at workshops and conventions, Wicks is especially appealing to people in the helping professions-physicians, teachers, psychologists, and ministers-assisting them to integrate the psychological and the spiritual so they can extend their emotional flames to others without burning out in the process. He has worked around the globe-from the psychological debriefing of relief workers evacuated to the United States from Rwanda to conducting workshops in Cambodia for members of the international community assigned to help the Khmer people rebuild their nation. Additionally, he delivered presentations at Walter Reed Army Hospital to health care professionals involved in caring for Iraqi war veterans with amputations and severe head injuries.
Wicks, a Queens, New York, native, received a master's degree in clinical psychology in 1973 from St. John's University and a doctorate in psychology from Philadelphia's Hahnemann Medical College in 1977. In 1996, Pope John Paul II awarded Wicks a papal medal for his service to the Catholic Church.
Wicks has written more than forty books. He serves as a professor of the graduate programs in pastoral counseling at Loyola College, Baltimore.
Wicks and his wife Michaele have a grown daughter. They live in suburban Baltimore, Maryland.
11/1/2011 4:00:00 AM