SoulSifting
Exploring Our Spiritual Needs
- Christian Living
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Published: 2026
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Publisher's Description
Everyone has basic spiritual needs, such as needs for meaning, wonder, hope, transcendence, forgiveness, and perspective. How well people fulfill these needs influences their health and well-being. This book discusses twenty-two spiritual needs that can be satisfied fully or partially only by embracing and connecting to something greater than ourselves. Just as physical needs for sustenance must be met with sufficient healthy food, spiritual needs must be met in healthy, nontoxic ways. In the past, religion fulfilled spiritual needs, but in today’s increasing secular and pluralistic world there are no commonly agreed upon ways to meet spiritual needs. People must be good consumers of spirituality, just like they must learn to be discriminating consumers in other areas of life. This book invites religious and nonreligious readers to use each chapter as a workbook, exploring how to meet each spiritual need in life-enhancing ways. Each chapter on a particular spiritual need is followed by reflection questions and activities to enhance the reader’s exploration of each need.
Endorsements (4)
“Scott Sullender illuminates with great skill, accessibility, and practicality how deeply the need is for spirituality that permeates all aspects of our lives and can be recognized and encountered in our most human longings and needs. SoulSifting serves as an outstanding and valuable resource, providing tools to help spiritual seekers discover, deepen, and integrate spirituality to enrich their everyday lives.”
“In SoulSifting, R. Scott Sullender reframes spirituality as a set of core human needs—making an often-abstract topic both practical and relatable. Drawing on decades of clinical experience, he explores how needs like meaning, trust, and purpose shape our lives in quiet but powerful ways. This is a thoughtful, accessible guide for anyone seeking to better understand themselves and engage life with greater clarity, care, and intention.”
“Because ‘the spiritual world is not easily experienced directly nor easily described in everyday language,’ Dr. Sullender identifies the different ways we humans seek to fulfill spiritual needs, thus helping us to connect the material and spiritual worlds. My own response: This is amazing. I’ve never thought about it that way.”
“You can read this book for many reasons—to see yourself and others more clearly, to remember what really matters, to hear the voice of a wise and unpretentious human, to feel within yourself the resonant, gravitational energy of Infinite Source that this book transmits—and I hope you will, for all of them.”
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