Amazing Grace: Obama Hits a Blue Note in Charleston
If Sunday morning at 11 o’clock is Christian America’s most segregated hour, then “Amazing Grace”…
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‘I Don’t Buy It’: The Gospel According to Frank Underwood
With bonus: 12 Quotes from the Underwood Bible
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None Means None (Not Atheist, Agnostic, Unbeliever…)
“I’d feel most comfortable assigning myself to the category of people who prefer not to be assigned to categories,” a fifty-something, Silicon Valley entrepreneur I’ll call Nathan* joked when I asked him how he’d describe his religious identification or affiliation. “But I suppose ‘none’ will do.”
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Coming Out As a Heretic
For folks who are unorthodox but aren’t atheists, who care about metaphysics but who aren’t mystics, perhaps the good old-fashioned term “heretic” will satisfy.
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Spiritual But Not Religious? Come Talk to Me
Most Sundays I don’t go to church because, frankly put, it bores me; I am tired and church fails to provide any compelling reason to get out of my pajamas. (Were I living in a large, cosmopolitan city where churches with high liturgy, weekly Eucharist, beautiful architecture, and trained musicians abounded, my story might be quite different.) Although I like the people at church very much and I wish to support them in their hours of need, I am still unwilling to prioritize membership. I have an emotionally demanding job that takes up all of my time and psychic energy during the academic year, and I would honestly rather get work done in my off hours than act as an usher or sit on a church governing body.
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What’s in an “Om”?: How Women are Transforming Yoga
At first, Michael McIntyre admits, he wasn’t sure why they weren’t making a documentary on yoga, as opposed to women and yoga. I wondered the same thing. Isn’t the stereotype of men that they are even more out of touch with their bodies than women; overscheduled and torn between conflicting demands that don’t allow a minute for introspection, contemplation, or the stillness from which groundedness is born? All these reasons are why the film claims women should do the practice. But Michael came to believe that they were documenting something momentous, and women were leading it. “As a man going to classes taught by men, I was getting the practice, but not the phenomenon,” he said. “Women are taking it to the next level.”
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Turn Off, Slow Down, Drop In: The Digital Generation Reinvents the Sabbath
As National Day of Unplugging looms (it begins a week from today) I hope we all can agree that taking time away from the frenzy of everyday life is a good thing. And pausing to reflect on the role of technology in our lives is important at a time when social technologies in particular are becoming increasingly integrated into daily life with effects that we are just beginning to describe and understand. But I do have to wonder if the keen, even if not hostile, focus on technology as such misses the phenomenological, relational, and spiritual mark just a bit.
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Chilean Mine Rescue: Largest Global Spiritual Event Ever?
One wonders how religious leaders might have exercised a more meaningful presence in the event as it unfolded and was engaged across a global digital landscape. As I scanned the emerging Facebook communities throughout the day and monitored Twitter feeds and news site comments, it was clear that few religious leaders were participating in what has to have been the most significant global spiritual conversation that has ever taken place on Earth.
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Thinking About God Makes Your Brain Bigger
A new book argues that spiritual practices, be they secular or religious, are inherently good for you. Meditation and prayer—be it about God, or evolution, or peace, or the Big Bang—will actually change your brain.
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No Turkey for Me: Confessions of an Indian Militant
Forty years ago, Indian militants, as they were then named, occupied the island of Alcatraz. In their memory, our writer reflects on both the bloody history of the first Thanksgiving, and the remarkable, enduring power of tribal tradition to create spiritual sustenance in the modern world.
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