About Us

LivingHour.org is an independent Thailand-based publisher that believes in the old adage that when you learn a new language, you acquire a new soul. We are dedicated to publishing unique easy Thai & Isaan language books that focus on the colloquial language of Thailand, as well as SBNR books that provide fresh perspectives on the spiritual life, via Progressive Christian, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions.

While many Thai language book publishers produce books written by Thai and foreign authors who no longer live in Thailand, we publish eBooks and books written by professional Thai and native-English speaking educators who live and work in the Kingdom. Our language books truly represent the street and workplace level Thai language spoken today, helping expats, English teachers, and tourists more fully enjoy their stay in the Land of Smiles.

In addition, we have carefully taken into account the criticisms that Thai language learners have had in the past with Thai phrasebooks, dictionaries, and other kinds of Thai language books. Those who purchase LivingHour.org’s ebooks and books can be assured of the following things:

1) All of our Thai sample sentences are very useful for daily situations and are not simply duplications of the kind of phrases found in other phrasebooks and free Thai language websites.

2) Our English phonetic spelling of Thai words is easy to understand and includes tones.

3) Every Thai sentence is followed by a word for word English translation, so readers can know for certain what Thai word corresponds with what English word(s).

4) The Thai script is published in a large enough font to be easily read and words are broken apart to facilitate Thai reading practice.

*All proceeds from book sales go to the development of lessons and course materials at the Ysaan Institute.

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What is SBNR?

SBNR means Spiritual But Not Religious. And millions of Americans identify themselves in such a way. There is great diversity of beliefs among the spiritual but not religious, but we here at The Living Hour are in full alignment with the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) when they say:

We reject the notion that all that is real or all that can be known is that which can be subject to empirical justification or can be measured. On the contrary, we know that love, kindness, generosity, awe and wonder, art, ethics, and music are just some of the valuable parts of life that cannot be understood or adequately captured by science. We call those aspects spiritual. But there is a huge problem when social change movements stay away from anything that calls itself spiritual.

We believe that many of the secular movements that exist in the world today actually have deep spiritual underpinnings, but often they are themselves unaware of those foundations, unable or unwilling to articulate them, and sometimes hold a knee-jerk antagonism to explicit spiritual or religious language. This antagonism limits their effectiveness, though it derives from a legitimate anger at the way that the language of spirituality and religion has been sometimes used to justify war, oppression, sexism, racism, homophobia, ecological indifference, or insensitivity to the suffering of the poor and the homeless of the world.

The Network of Spiritual Progressives