religion

An American living much of the year in Mexico wrote asking me to “state my religious agenda.” I accept the challenge, but question its premise.

After sitting for an hour overlooking the canyon and gorge beyond town, the alertness of a meditative state may well have saved me from getting bitten by a rattlesnake. One…

Still a young man, he spent 9 years in a Japanese monastery. With shaved head and monk’s dress he looks the part. But from the start of the conversation he…

There’s a story about a woman being herded off the train at Auschwitz after enduring conditions unfit for the cattle previously transported in the same cars. Stepping onto the platform,…

Alfred Russel Wallace was the co-discoverer, with Charles Darwin, of natural selection. He wrote within a decade of the “Origin of Species” that the mystery of consciousness was proof that…

The ancient Romans had terms for a duality that persists to this day. They referred to ”vita contemplativa” versus ”vita activa” — the contemplative life vs. the active life.

Since a grasslands fire swept leapt the creek about a decade ago, the great sycamore on its banks has been slowly dying. Sitting under it now is a reminder that…

I don’t really like the word mystic; there’s something rather mystical about it. But for lack of a better term, mystics are simply human beings who have a tendency toward…