Spirituality & Health Magazine: About Us

Our Staff

Publisher
Victoria C. Sutherland

Media Editor
Heather Shaw

Design, Art Direction, and Production (print)
B&G Design Studios

Adveristing Sales
Goodfellow Publishers' Representatives

Editor-In-Chief
Stephen Kiesling was raised Catholic but left the church and became an oarsman. He began studying embodied spirituality as a Scholar of the House in philosophy at Yale, where he wrote the acclaimed book The Shell Game: Reflections on Rowing and the Pursuit of Excellence while training for the 1980 Olympic Rowing Team. He was a founding editor of American Health, which won the General Excellence Award from the American Society of Magazine Editors in 1985. At the same time, he was a spokesman for Nike and co-wrote Nike's Cross Training System. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Outside, and Sports Illustrated. He was the founder of the Ashland (Oregon) High School Crew and the Ashland Rowing Club. He currently lives on the Rogue River in Gold Hill, Oregon, where he is building a world-class whitewater kayak course. He is an experienced coach, speaker and workshop leader. He has been a guest on Today, All Things Considered and many other television and radio shows. In September 2006, he won three gold medals in the FISA Masters World Rowing Championships and is currently training to become the oldest member of the 2008 US Olympic Rowing Team.

Managing Editor
Betsy Robinson worked in the theater as an actor/playwright for ten years. Her last production was a one-woman one-act called Darleen Dances at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. The opening monologue became one of the most-performed audition pieces for actresses after it was published in Moving Parts (Viking Penguin, 1992), and the entire play is published in Girl Stories & Game Plays. It is a play about finding God within. In her own quest for this, she attended a four-year healing school, worked at Parabola Magazine and Books, has become a specialist editing spiritual psychology texts, and served as an editor and promotional consultant for the Ringing Rocks Foundation’s Profiles of Healing book series about traditional healers and medicine people. Betsy has been a columnist for UPI’s Religion and Spirituality Forum, and her first novel, Plan Z by Leslie Kove, was published by Mid-List Press as winner of their 2001 First Novel Series Award. She received a 1987/88 Writers Guild East fellowship to write a movie called The Love Convention, and appeared in the movies, Return of the Secaucus Seven and Lianna. Although she spends most of her time writing and editing nonfiction for S&H, she continues to believe that the most powerful way to grow and change has no words ... or is through the words of fiction ... or not. She just finished writing a new novel that takes place in the wonderful world of energy healing. Her website is www.betsyrobinson-writer.com.

Print Magazine Design and Art Direction
B&G Design Studios is an award-winning design team with 25 years' combined experience in consumer magazines, advertising, and corporate communications. S&H's principal designer John Goryl has been the associate art director of Philadelphia Magazine for the past four years. He was chosen Designer of the Year by the City and Regional Magazine Association, and he has won a Jesse H. Neal Editorial Achievement Award (the Pulitzer Prize of the business press) and an ADDY award from the American Advertising Federation. A Pennsylvania native and graduate of the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and Rome, with degrees in design and illustration, Goryl began his career at The Cable Guide and Total TV magazines, later working as a designer for ABC/Capital Cities Publishing and the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine and as an illustrator for Dow Jones, New York Newsday, and Parents magazine. His work has been honored by the Society of Publication Designers and Print Magazine, and he has served as a judge for regional design and illustrations competitions.

Web Producer
Michael Wu is a consultant for Bandwidth Productions, a design company specializing in web design, information architecture, development and maintenance. He has produced and managed websites for major companies including NBC, Disney, the National Hockey League and eight of its member teams. He also has extensive experience building e-commerce sites. His website for Disney's Go Network Auction site outranked Ebay and Yahoo Auctions for Gomez Advisor's coveted top rating in "ease of use." His latest project is FIQL.com, a website dedicated to growing a music playlist community online. Michael is based in New York.

Advertising Sales
Goodfellow Publishers' Representatives
Niche Advertising Specialists

GPR has been involved with the national magazine advertising, marketing and consulting for over 25 years. During that time they have been associated with Mother Jones, Vegetarian Times, East West Journal (now Natural Health), New Age Journal (now Body & Soul), and Yoga Journal. Deena E. Brown got her start as a writer and editor with Parents' magazine. Geoff Goldstein began his publishing career in magazine distribution and has worked with the San Francsico Bay Guardian and Serendipity Couriers. Liz Dalbianco was recruited fresh out of the University of California at Berkeley, and is the backbone of the organization.

GOODFELLOW PUBLISHERS' REPRESENTATIVES
1658 University Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94703
(510) 548-1680 ext 301 Fax: (510) 548-8617
deena@gpr4ads.com

Frequently Asked Questions

What do you mean by spirituality? Is that another way of saying religion?

Perhaps the simplest way to make the distinction is to say we're talking about experience, not doctrine. Though spirituality is a part of all religions, no religion can own it, and those who aren't comfortable with organized religion are no less involved in the journey. This approach honors questions, mysteries, and journeys of discovery over dogmatic answers, closed systems, and now-you've-made-it destinations. Respecting and drawing upon the world's great wisdom traditions (religions) as well as the latest insights from medicine, psychology, sociology, ecology, and the natural sciences, we speak to people from various religious traditions or no religious tradition at all.

So how does Spirituality & Health feel about religion?

One of the reasons we're focusing on spiritual practice is that, being based on action and experience, practice provides a rich area of commonality among religions (because, let's face it, on the level of beliefs, there's a lot of disagreement). To give one simple example of how that works: even though Pope John Paul II in his recent book warns against Buddhist beliefs as a threat to Catholicism, a lively and mutually pleasurable dialogue is going on between Buddhist and Roman Catholic monks. What do they find to talk about so agreeably? Spiritual practice. Philosopher Ken Wilber points out in The Marriage of Sense and Soul (Random House, 1998) that spiritual practice even meets the test of empirical science: instead of being asked to take anything on faith (dogma), you're invited to try it to discover how it works and to compare your experience with that of others.

What kind of health are you talking about?

We mean health in the broadest, fullest sense of the word. It includes individual health in body, mind, heart, and soul, yes — but that kind of self-oriented health is inextricably linked to healthy relationships, families, workplaces, communities, governments, and eco-systems. It would be audacious of us to think we could redefine the word so radically if it weren't inherent in the nature of spirituality to see all things as interconnected. In other words, nobody can be fully healthy — fully alive, even — except in relationship with other people and things. By the way, this is a particularly web-friendly mode of thinking, being rooted in systems thinking instead of the old mechanistic approach.

So is this self-help?

Well, it's certainly helpful to the self. When we did focus groups, one member said she liked the project because "I'm living in the spirituality/self-help section of Barnes & Noble, and [Spirituality & Health] has all the authors I want to read." Now, if by self-help you mean totally about "me, my improvement, getting the most out of my life, and everybody else can get lost," then we'd have to say no. We think that one of the reasons people are turning to spirituality today is that they're seeking wholeness in a world that frequently makes them feel fractured, and they're looking for ways to connect with all of life. Spirituality & Health takes some of the tools of self-help and uses them to help people see beyond the self.

Is all spirituality positive?

No. There's a dark side to the force, so to speak, and it's our responsibility to acknowledge it, indeed to study it. Being open and non-dogmatic doesn't mean being gullible, and it doesn't mean that everything is okay. Spirituality taps into anyone's core vulnerabilities. As researcher Dr. Jared Kass points out, "your inner voice is not free from distortions." And teachers can abuse a very sensitive relationship. The most spectacular results make the news -- Waco, Heaven's Gate, the Freemen. More subtle examples occur daily. That's why our Self-Tests are all based on the time-tested work of qualified researchers, and we feature respected teachers. We include warnings, when appropriate, to help the user avoid the pitfalls, and we do not shy away from making people aware of the whole picture, bad as well as good.

Isn't it strange to approach such a cosmic topic through multiple-choice tests?

The Self-Tests are only one part of Spirituality & Health, but they are a vital aspect of the site. One reason is precisely because they allow us to approach a topic that's generally treated as ethereal in a way that's simple, specific, and — in the purest sense of the word — mundane (i.e., practical, rooted in the world). Only by keeping in touch with the ordinary, often tested by the body, can we fight the grandiosity that threatens the spirit. While the scoring is numeric and generated by an algorithm, the interpretation is purely heuristic — it takes place in your mind and heart as you contemplate what your score might mean. Does it make sense? Why? Not make sense? How come? What did you learn? The Self-Tests are a path to self-knowledge, helpful guides to actions you can choose.

It's also important to remember that, in talking about spirituality, we're talking about experience, not doctrine. All experience has some measurable effect on the body and mind, which can be a helpful reference.

Body? I thought this was about spirit?

Oh, boy, you walked right into this one. We'd love to talk about how Descartes, Gnosticism, and the narrow materialism of the Enlightenment era drove a wedge between body and spirit, a schism that's led to the modern sense of Balkanization and meaninglessness. Just get us going -- we enjoy it. Okay, you want the short version? It was well explained by T George Harris in the preview issue of Spirituality & Health magazine. He said we're now breaking through a matching pair of contradictions that have outlived their value:

Most of us sense that our prayers and deeper beliefs -- the spiritual side -- play an important role in disease and health, but scientific aversion to any hint of "faith healing" has prevented serious research on practices such as meditation or the medical effects of belief and hope.
Most of us feel our deeper experiences with our total being — we sense that our body and its sensory system are windows on the soul — but most of our religious authorities have treated the flesh as too weak and sinful to contribute to our spiritual growth and learning.

The breakthrough is to realize that body and soul are parts of a whole.

Okay, well, you have to admit it's strange to address spirituality on the Web.

No, we don't. There's something inherently meditative about using the Internet. Think about what people are doing, seated comfortably, attention focused, clicking away sometimes for hours at a time. We're simply offering a way to become more intentional about it.

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