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Once upon a time there was a Book. It contained spiritual teachings, stories, and even some history. But this Book had another, hidden feature: it was a mirror. If your heart was filled with hate, you would read this Book and find all the hate you could want. If your heart was filled with compassion,…

Once upon a time I read that when the nation of Israel was being created in 1947, that the leading Rabbis were gathered to decide what the national language would be. You'd think it would obviously be Hebrew, but the concern was that if Hebrew became the national language, then the language of the Torah…

In Christian monasticism, a period of years of rigorous study of Sacred Texts and spiritual practice were regarded as prerequisites for meditative practice and expression of the Teachings in daily life. Many other religious traditions have the same view. This suggests that the modern Western search for spiritual experiences, frequently divorced from serious religious study…

Prelude in C (BWV 547)        J.S.Bach (1685-1750) [ORGAN] "There's a Wideness To God's Mercy" Fugue in C (BWV 547) J.S.Bach (1685-1750) More observations on the first chapter of John’s Gospel begun last week… The Middle East, including first century Palestine, was (and still is) very patriarchal. Yet sometimes translations make the New…

In studying the martial arts, in order to improve it is absolutely essential to spar with your betters. There is no way around it: if you want to get better, you have to spar with partners who can hand you your ass on a platter. Mind you, the lesson is not to just stand there…

The metaphor of ‘left brain vs. right brain’ is oversimplified, of course, but does have its uses. You know, the idea that the left hemisphere of the brain is concerned with reason and logic, and the right with poetry and imagination. In that sense I think it is safe to say that our culture has…

When it comes to Creativity, it would seem that 'new' ideas must come either from nowhere or somewhere. The notion of 'creative ideas from nothing' is much like the Christian idea that God created the cosmos ex nihilo — Latin for 'from nothing'. But there's another kind of creativity — combining existing things in new…

Science is built on the principle of repeatable experiments: at least in the hard sciences one can repeat any of its experiments and verify the results for oneself. (In the 'softer' sciences like geology, however, it may be a little harder to reproduce results requiring millions of years!) But suppose one actually wanted to take…

When I hear the phrase "that old time religion", my thoughts turn to ALL the way back to the first century or so after Christ — as old as Christianity gets! And at that time a very allegorical approach to Scripture was popular if not the norm. Because, for them, the point of Scripture is…

"Nine-tenths of the news, as printed in the papers, is pseudo-news, manufactured events. Some days ten-tenths. The ritual morning trance, in which one scans columns of newsprint, creates a peculiar form of generalized pseudo-attention to a pseudo-reality. This experience is taken seriously. It is one’s daily immersion in “reality.” One’s orientation to the rest of…