The book, a collection of 26 personal narratives, includes pieces by such luminaries as new-age critic and author Mariana Caplan, Wired magazine contributing editor Erik Davis, Circle Foundation founder Julia Butterfly Hill, and local spiritual mover-and-shaker and Stone Circles founder Claudia Horwitz. Awarding the book "Choice of the Month" in the religion and spirituality category, Amazon.com had this to say about Radical Spirit: "This is a highly recommended anthology for all ages and all spiritual orientations—one that offers radical and ageless messages of enduring love, hope, and optimism."

Buehler's piece, entitled "Seekers Wanted: Apply Within," focuses on the struggle for a sincere spiritual seeker to reconcile the demands of "the real world"—particularly in the form of job and career. "The Job is, after all, the central point of American identity," writes Buehler. "We are profoundly identified with our livelihoods. The answer to ‘Who are you?' is usually answered with a vocation."

The essay chronicles Buehler's quest from living a rustic, Walden-esque, $1000-a-year existence in the hills of West Virginia to a job as a graveyard shift security guard, from freelancing entrepreneur to high-paced software start-up company, from angst-ridden college student to married family man.

Medlock's piece takes a very different tone. Barely 20 years old when she wrote it, Medlock shows profound insight in her chronicling of the paradoxes of everyday life. The piece, which turned out to be an early stage in her coming out as a lesbian, explores both the alienation and also deeper meaning present in the commonplace and the mundane. Writes Medlock: "Everybody's searching, each in his own way. Everybody's dealing with the same stuff—they always have been, too. Year after year, era after era. Always...People come and go from the shop with bags of bagels and white, styrofoam cups. Gaggles of teenagers in pickup trucks and cowboy boots. Long-haired young women with babies on their hips. Old men wearing ringlets of gray hair and wide smiles."

Medlock and Buehler both did a great deal of their work in the Self Knowledge Symposium (SKS). Medlock served as both President of the Duke student SKS group and editor-in-chief of the group's nationally distributed student-published spiritual magazine The Symposium; Buehler, the first-ever student in the now 13-year-old not-for-profit organization, serves as a mentor and teacher, offering among other things a writing workshop entitled "The Zen of Writing: Writing as a Spiritual Discipline."

"The process of writing is a powerful tool for self-discovery," says Buehler. "Writing demands self-knowledge; it forces the writer to become a student of human nature, to pay attention to his experience, to understand the connection found therein. By delving into this raw experience and distilling it into a work of art, the writer is engaging in the heart and soul of philosophy: making sense out of life."

Medlock agrees. "Writing, as a tool for introspection and contemplation, is probably the most valuable thing I gained from all my time in school."

Further opportunities for young people to acquire tools of this sort will be made available for the first time on a nationwide basis with the advent of Inward Bound, a first-of-its-kind national gathering of students and like-minded university faculty focused on integrating transformative education and spiritual exploration into the university experience, this coming October.

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Buehler and Medlock will be the featured guests on "The Tom Kearney Show" on WPTF-680AM on Thursday, April 18^th at 10:00p.

Note: Rachel Medlock will be in the Raleigh-Durham area from April 18^th-22^nd.

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The Self Knowledge Symposium Foundation (SKSF) is a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging people to consciously develop their own personal, moral and spiritual values and to live according to them. The SKSF has been praised as "the hottest thing happening in higher education today" by Dr. William Willimon, Dean of Duke University Chapel, ranked by Newsweek as one of the top ten preachers in the English-speaking world and author of The Search for Meaning. At the forefront of the national interest in spirituality, the SKSF creates experiential learning programs and social contexts within which people can explore the deeper questions in life, developing intellectual understanding and personal character in a quest for the life worth living. The SKSF advises the SKS campus groups, sponsors a non-student discussion group, and co-sponsors meetings, lectures, retreats and The Symposium spiritual journal. For more information, visit www.selfknowledge.org.