John Kunnathu spreads the message of love and peace through his literary work.
Born in India, he was brought up in the native Christian tradition. The worldview offered by the Christian religious tradition as the foundation of life, he built up his life with the additional support from the other cultural traditions that surrounded him in India. Early on in life, he asked the basic questions of life, and converted his life into a search for the truth.
Having been a school teacher for a quarter of a century around the globe has been another factor that helped him develop a global vision of life.
Writing has always been a means of learning for him. Each piece of literary work serves as a stepping stone to climb up further. He sees himself as a learner of life, and in his literary works, he shares the lessons he learns with the fellow learners. He doesn't claim any authority to his ideas, nor would he advice any readers to blindly accept any of his opinions, however convincing they sound. Rather, he invites his readers to seek the truth of life along with him.
Although he belongs to the Christian religious tradition, he sees himself primarily as a human being, and he can relate to any fellow human being on the earth. Bible and other ancient classics are for him precious inheritance of humankind. They are seen as the seeds left by the mighty civilizations that lived and died on the earth. A better understanding of the priceless wisdom contained in these classics has the power to raise the humankind to a higher plane.
In his literary work, he makes the wisdom and myth of the ancients amazingly relevant to the contemporary world. He also skillfully recreates them through his stories, poems, meditations, dialogs, and essays.
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Print: $5.38 Download: FREE This is a collection of 25 poems in Malayalam. Each poem is based on a psalm, summarizing and clarifying the main ideas. They can be used in Sunday school and in prayer meetings as well as in individual meditation.
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Print: $5.92 Download: FREE This is a collection of poems in Malayalam, and each poem is a Bible story. The stories are retold in such a way as to leave a lasting impression upon the hearts of the readers.
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Print: $6.71 Download: $1.25 The author is sharing in these pages some of his thoughts on one of the issues most people face everywhere –leadership crisis. Very often the ones who lead the blind also happen to be blind. Also those who appear as good shepherds could be really wolves in disguise.
The author raises issues such as what makes a good shepherd, and how we can identify a wolf in disguise. He argues extensively that instead of staying away from their sheep as a separate class, the shepherds need to identify themselves with the sheep, willing to learn along with them. He also suggests that the clergy should be relieved from all the administrative responsibilities so that they can take care of their real responsibilities effectively.
These thoughts were developed in the context of a discussion in an online forum that consists of the members of the Indian Orthodox Church. However, the insights developed here may be applied in any situation where leadership crisis occurs.
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Print: $7.49 Download: $1.25 This book is an imaginary inter-religious dialog between a Christian and a Hindu in the first century. Willing to understand each other, they see a huge wall that separates two civilizations collapses. Though the Christian in the dialog is a historical person— John, the Apostle, the Hindu in the dialog is an imaginary person, Ananda, a Vedic scholar. Ours is a world of huge walls. People find themselves in various camps based on their beliefs and traditions. We pay more attention to what divide us rather than what unite us. The very survival of humanity is in peril due to the walls that separate us. This is the context in which the author is contributing this book of inter-religious dialog. In these pages one can see an exposition of the basics of the origin and development of Christianity as understood by the author while it was written. The writer’s attempt was to understand Jesus and the origin of the church in the historical context.
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Print: $7.69 Download: $1.25 This is a collection of 22 speeches and lectures that touched the author's heart. Writing down a summary of any speech or lecture that touched his heart became a habit for him because he didn’t want those voices to vanish in the air.
All these speakers are challenging us to live an authentic life of meaning. Human beings are born with the freedom to live a fruitful life, and we need to claim that freedom. All the speakers here are deeply and truly religious and spiritual, but none of them are fundamentalists. Having their foundation in the inherited spiritual tradition, they all have developed a vision that embraces all humanity. Although they all belong to the Christian religious tradition, they have the courage to bluntly and fearlessly criticize the blindness and hypocrisy manifested at all levels in their own religion.
The speakers include well-known bishops such as Geevarghese Mar Osthathios and Thomas Mar Makarios, and well-known theologians such as Dr. Wesley Ariarajah and Dr. Valsan Thambu.
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Print: $7.85 Download: $1.25 This is a collection of sixteen stories. Although all the stories are from the Bible, and must be familiar to most of the readers, the author presents them afresh by breathing a new life into each of them.
Having become a part of our collective unconscious, these stories lie at the very foundation of our individual and social life. A better understanding of each of those stories can help us lay a better foundation to our life, thus making our life stronger and more meaningful.
One does not have to be a Christian or a Bible believer to enjoy these stories. Each story can leave a powerful message in the mind of any reader.
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Print: $7.11 Download: $1.25 Consisting of fifteen questions about life and the author's answers, this book takes the form of a conversation in a setting that is common for the three major Semitic religious traditions in the world. The conversation happens in ancient Alexandria before Christ in a Jewish Synagogue between a Rabbi and some young people. The Rabbi answers the questions of the young people with the help of the first three chapters of Genesis, which consists of the hymn of Creation and the story of Adam and Eve. This part of the Scriptures is commonly accepted by all the Semitic religions. Thus indirectly this book offers a commentary of this part of the scripture. The rabbi uses religious scriptures and religious beliefs to answer the basic questions of existence. He doesn't teach religion for the sake of religion, nor does he teach religious beliefs as the only way of attaining salvation.
One can see in these pages how the people in ancient Judea answered the basic questions of existence.
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Print: $8.51 Download: $1.25 The author is presenting a few of his own meditations on thirty beautiful psalms in these pages. Being the meditations of a layman, they are true to life although they are not scholarly studies. The context in which the psalms were written is related to our own context in the modern world. This is an attempt to have a closer look at our own life here and now with the help of psalms, the invaluable pearls of wisdom that we have inherited from our ancestors.
The author sees himself primarily as a human being, and he can relate to any human being on the planet regardless of their race, color, religion, language or nationality. In psalms he sees the deepest feelings and thoughts of human beings. The author is not making any attempt to support or promote any doctrines or dogmas of either Judaism or Christianity in these pages. What he is promoting, however, is a universal vision of one humanity and one world. Therefore, all those who possess an open mind are invited to read these meditations.
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Print: $9.35 Download: $1.25 The prince of Heaven is a color story book for children. It tells the story of how the earth used to be a part of heaven in the past, but somehow, the inhabitants of the earth became blind, and lost the power to see the truth. Thus emerged all sorts of walls that separated people from people. A huge wall appeared between heaven and earth. The prince of heaven descended to the earth with the mission of saving mankind from blindness and of breaking all those walls of separation.
The author spreads the message of love and peace through this story. Not only does he make the ancient myth of Christmas amazingly relevant to the contemporary world, but he also skillfully recreates it.
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