Margaret Placentra Johnston

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Why is Margaret Placentra Johnston Writing About Spiritual Development?

More about me.

So - how did this all come about? Well, years ago, completely by accident - or so I, Margaret Placentra Johnston, Optometrist, thought at the time! - I ran across the book "The Road Less Traveled" by M. Scott Peck. Here is a story about how I came across it and more about the effect it had on me. This book introduced the concept of the religious or spiritual growth stages and the very idea of that more or less blew me away.

After that first encounter, I kept reading more and more about those spiritual development stages. Once I got past Peck's writings, everything else I came across about the spritual development stages was either written at the academic level and very hard to plow through or would appear as just a very small portion of a larger work. There seemed to be almost no acknowlegement of these stages in our popular culture.

Yet seeing correlations among the writings of many theorists on this topic, gave me a viewpoint that seemed to explain a lot of the craziness that surrounds religion. I began to wonder why we don't hear more about these stages in the popular culture.

By about 2004, my life was obviously changing. I had sold my Dr. Margaret P. Johnston, Optometrist practice in Springfield, VA, so, while I was still doing a lot of Optometry, my responsibilites in the office were becoming limited to patient care - which I had always said was the easiest part of being an Optometrist! Meanwhile my family responsibilties were decreasing as my kids headed off to college.

Suddenly one day it hit me! I, Margaret Johnston, was the one who should bring information about spiritual development to the general public! Through most of my adult life, I have always had the feeling that I should one day write a book about something - but I had no idea what.

I have always been a story-teller. My kid's favorite thing when they were little was to get me to tell them stories from when I was little. Here's one I will share with you now.

So I began to think - why not put all those ideas together - tell about the spiritual development stages in a book by writing real life stories about real people?

The book that grew out of this idea has consumed much of my time and energy for several years, but at long last it is finished. A very kind publisher (Quest Books) has agreed to publish it. Faith Beyond Belief: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind should appear on bookstore shelves in October, 2012. Please join me, Margaret Placentra Johnston, in my search for understanding how people decide what they believe - about how we got here and and why and where we are going next. You can sign up for an email notification when my book becomes available using the form below.

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