05 May 2016

Book on Smartphones, Social Media and Spirituality for People of All Faiths




"Photograph God: Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your LIfe gives us an amazing perspective on our own existence, especially in the age of interconnected iPhone culture." - Prof. Michael Bielicky, Head of Department of Digital Media/Postdigital Narratives, University of Art and Design/ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany

“Mel Alexenberg offers a scintillating experiment in creativity. His work is an invitation to deepen your spiritual sensibilities as you extend your imagination.” - Jan Phillips, author of God Is at Eye Level: Photography as a Healing Art    

Photograph God is an intellectually exciting book that stimulates the sensory palate.  Dr. Alexenberg shares in-depth, meaningful insights about encountering God in the creative process through photography.  Using photography as the vehicle, we are guided, one idea at a time, to an understanding of what the author means by, ’looking up, looking out, and looking inward.’”  -  T. Mandel Chenoweth, Head of the Art Education Department, Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma

“Mel Alexenberg transforms what sounds like blasphemy - "capturing" God in photographs and restricting Him to two-dimensional images - into a mystical exercise as we open our eyes to the Divinity found in our everyday lives. The book's wonderful synthesis between spirituality and technology, heaven and earth, is exciting and thought-provoking.”  - Rabbi Chanan Morrison, author of Gold from the Land of Israel

“One of art’s most complete and compelling integrations of the sacred and profane.  It reads like a swift and soulful breeze.  Mel Alexenberg shows the way to the divine via digital imagery and heightened perception of its presence in the moving face of every person, place, and thing. It reads like a swift and soulful breeze. I love every “byte” of it.”  - Dr. Shaun McNiff, author of Earth Angels: Engaging the Sacred in Everyday Things, University Professor, Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
                                                                                                                             
“There are many parallels in Christian thought and deed that should allow this excellent book to resonate with many people of faith. When I picked up Prof. Alexenberg's book, I happened to be reading a spiritual guide on contemplative prayer by an anonymous 14th century Christian mystic whose words find a parallel in Alexenberg's exhortation to seek the Divine out in the world in all that you see and photograph, and with love.  He has succeeded in creating a program for photographers, on a daily basis, to explicitly weave their faith into their art and ultimately, back into their worldview with a fresh perspective.”- Bob Weil, co-author of The Art of iPhone Photography

“Thinks brilliantly outside the box.  It synthesizes the realm of the abstruse and transcendent with the realm of the concrete and immanent.  It crisscrosses disciplines, from science and technology to philosophy and mysticism to art. This is one of those books that other thinkers will wish they had somehow thought about how to write, and to which readers of diverse sorts will simply respond by saying: wow!” - Dr. Ori Z. Soltes, author of Tradition and Transformation, Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Fine Arts, Georgetown University

“Photograph God strikes a balance between Kabbalah and contemporary culture.  It is literate, wise, and easily accessible.” - Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, author of God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning

"Alexenberg proposes that text and image - something as simple as photos taken with a smartphone, and multiplied in their resonance by the Internet - can be a consciousness raising tool." - Peter Samis, Associate Curator, Interpretation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

“I can feel your joy, warmth and good humor in your images. Your approach, while fundamentally spiritual and fired by a kindred spark as my own passion for seeing, is a mirror of a different sort of our mutual exploration of our humanity.” - Julie DuBose, author of Effortless Beauty: Photography as an Expression of Eye, Mind and Heart,  Director, Miksang Institute for Contemplative Photography, Colorado

“In his sophisticated and highly literate book, Prof. Alexenberg weaves in a playful way the threads between contemporary digital culture and traditional Jewish wisdom.  In an original way, he invites us to connect the networked world of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, WhatsApp and Blogspot, with the concept of the unseen God.  - Dr. Yael Eylat Van-Essen, author of Digital Culture: Virtuality, Society and Information, teaches new media at Tel Aviv University and the Holon Institute of Technology, Israel

“A mystical computer program for spiritual seeing.” – Rabbi Dr. Shimon Cowen, Director, Institute for Judaism and Civilization, Australia