{ "item_title" : "The Cosmic Apprenticeship", "item_author" : [" Siyabonga Mbambo "], "item_description" : "Why are we born unfinished?By the coals of a dying fire, after a family gathering, a son asks his father the question every family eventually asks: The church says Gogo is in heaven. Uncle says the ancestors watch over us. The pastor says the ancestors are demons. Which one is true?His father does not give the answer he was given as a boy. He asks for time. This book is that time.In The Cosmic Apprenticeship, Siyabonga Mbambo proposes that a human life is an apprenticeship. We arrive unfinished. We are formed by what we inherit and by what we choose. And one day we hand on what we have become. We are heirs of the dead, apprentices among the living, and ancestors of the unborn.Written as a letter to his children and grandchildren, and to readers from Soweto to Seoul, the book takes up the questions that cross every border: What is the I that is being formed, and did it exist before we were born?What do we inherit from those before us, and what must we refuse to pass on?How should we honour our ancestors without living in fear of them?What happens when we die, and where are those who never heard the gospel?Is heaven a place above us, or the Source from which everything comes?What are we being prepared for in an age of artificial intelligence, gene editing and a changing climate?To answer them, Mbambo draws on the Bible, read honestly and in context, and on the African ancestral spirituality he was raised in. He listens to the great traditions of the world: the Yoruba ori, the Hindu ātman, the Buddhist teaching of not-self, Confucian reverence for the generations and the Jewish chain of transmission. And he weighs what science now tells us about the cosmos and our common human origins. He names where the traditions agree and where they differ, plainly and without contempt.This is not a book that claims to have every answer. It shows its working, including the places where the author has changed his mind. It asks you to argue with it, test it, and go further than he could.Inside you will find: Sixteen chapters in seven movements, from the beginning of a life to its commissionPractices and questions for reflection at the end of most chaptersA Rule of Life for the ApprenticeOpen questions the book leaves to its readersA glossary, notes and suggestions for further readingFor anyone who has stood between the church and the ancestors, between faith and science, or between the answers they were given and the questions they still carry, The Cosmic Apprenticeship offers a way to hold them together, and a reason to keep asking.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/816/093/9798160939186_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "16.99", "online_price" : "16.99", "our_price" : "16.99", "club_price" : "16.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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