Alone, Yet Not Alone

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book “God in Search of Man”: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement...get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal. .

..To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

And yet Heschel understood that the faith expressed by many, even many who are inwardly conflicted, is often dull, oppressive and insipid — a religiosity in which “faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion.”

There must be something legalistic in the human makeup, because cold, rigid, unambiguous, unparadoxical belief is common, especially considering how fervently the Scriptures oppose it.

And yet there is a silent majority who experience a faith that is attractively marked by combinations of fervor and doubt, clarity and confusion, empathy and moral demand. 

For example, Audrey Assad is a Catholic songwriter with a crystalline voice and a sober intensity to her stage presence. (You can see her perform her song “I Shall Not Want” on YouTube.) She writes the sort of emotionally drenched music that helps people who are in crisis. A surprising number of women tell her they listened to her music while in labor. 

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Heaven is real, says neurosurgeon who claims to have visited the afterlife

Dr. Eben Alexander has taught at Harvard Medical School and has earned a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. And while Alexander says he's long called himself a Christian, he never held deeply religious beliefs or a pronounced faith in the afterlife.

But after a week in a coma during the fall of 2008, during which his neocortex ceased to function, Alexander claims he experienced a life-changing visit to the afterlife, specifically heaven.

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A Defensive Anchor Walks a Spiritual Path

It was three days before the Steelers’ A.F.C. divisional playoff game against the Baltimore Ravens, a matchup in which the Super Bowl aspirations of two worthy contenders hang in the balance, and Polamalu was getting himself centered.
“How many millions of people woke up in the morning, never to see the evening?” Polamalu read.

And then: “The life of a man is a dream. In a dream, one sees things that do not exist; he might see that he is crowned a king, but when he wakes up, he sees that in reality he is just a pauper.”
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A pacifist whose tough play epitomizes his violent sport, Polamalu is the anchor of both the Pittsburgh defense and its locker room. In a vote this season of the players, Polamalu was voted the team’s most valuable player, becoming the first safety since Donnie Shell in 1980 to be so honored.

Congregations Gone Wild

With consumerism now causing disaffection in the clergy, as well as education and health care, who is going to take care of all of the "consumers"?? Everyone seems to be burning out!
Uvealblues

THE American clergy is suffering from burnout, several new studies show. And part of the problem, as researchers have observed, is that pastors work too much. Many of them need vacations, it’s true. But there’s a more fundamental problem that no amount of rest and relaxation can help solve: congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling.
The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people.
As a result, pastors are constantly forced to choose, as they work through congregants’ daily wish lists in their e-mail and voice mail, between paths of personal integrity and those that portend greater job security.
As religion becomes a consumer experience, the clergy become more unhappy and unhealthy.

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Four Rules to Get Us Through Tough Times - Capturing Wisdom Before It Fades From Memory

Words spoken from the heart, will enter the heart.

                   -The Talmud-

Rabbi Kroloff's Four Practices to Get You Through Life's Tough Times and Keep Your Head on Straight and Your Heart in the Right Place

WHEN IS AN APOLOGY NOT AN APOLOGY?

Steven Ing takes on the response of the Catholic Church to the most recent allegations of sexual abuse and offers up some advice to the Pope here.

Man vs. God

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution has indeed dealt a blow to the idea of a benign creator, literally conceived. It tells us that there is no Intelligence controlling the cosmos, and that life itself is the result of a blind process of natural selection, in which innumerable species failed to survive. The fossil record reveals a natural history of pain, death and racial extinction, so if there was a divine plan, it was cruel, callously prodigal and wasteful. Human beings were not the pinnacle of a purposeful creation; like everything else, they evolved by trial and error and God had no direct hand in their making. No wonder so many fundamentalist Christians find their faith shaken to the core.

But Darwin may have done religion—and God—a favor by revealing a flaw in modern Western faith. Despite our scientific and technological brilliance, our understanding of God is often remarkably undeveloped—even primitive. In the past, many of the most influential Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers understood that what we call "God" is merely a symbol that points beyond itself to an indescribable transcendence, whose existence cannot be proved but is only intuited by means of spiritual exercises and a compassionate lifestyle that enable us to cultivate new capacities of mind and heart.

Religious Directives....hmmm....

Pope Decries ‘Clouds of Evil’ Over Africa at Mass
LUANDA, Angola (AP) -- Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass for the largest gathering of his African pilgrimage Sunday, telling a crowd on the outskirts of this seaside capital that reconciliation on the war-ravaged continent would come only with a ''change of heart, a new way of thinking.''

The Vatican said as many as 1 million people turned out on the dusty field near a cement factory to hear the pope at the last major event of his seven-day trip, which began Tuesday in Cameroon.

Speaking from a tented pink altar, the pope said evils in Africa had ''reduced the poor to slavery and deprived future generations of the resources needed to create a more solid and just society.''

''How true it is that war can destroy everything of value,'' said Benedict, wearing a pink cape and mopping his sweaty brow with a white handkerchief kept inside his sleeve.

Later he was scheduled to meet with representatives of women's rights groups to praise the role of women in African society.
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''It is nearly always the woman who maintains intact human dignity, defends the family and protects cultural and religious values,'' the pontiff said, lamenting that the importance of family ''is not given the consideration it deserves.''


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Hardline Saudi clerics urge TV ban on women, music

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia – A group of Saudi clerics urged the kingdom's new information minister on Sunday to ban women from appearing on TV or in newspapers and magazines, making clear that the country's hardline religious establishment is skeptical of a new push toward moderation.
In a statement, the 35 hardline clergymen also called on Abdel Aziz Khoja, who was appointed by King Abdullah on Feb. 14, to prohibit the playing of music and music shows on television.
"We have great hope that this media reform will be accomplished by you," said the statement. "We have noticed how well-rooted perversity is in the Ministry of Information and Culture, in television, radio, press, culture clubs and the book fair."
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French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, in town for meetings with Saudi officials, told a news conference that during lunch he sat between a female Saudi surgeon and a female journalist. He said while one woman is allowed to perform surgery and another is allowed to teach, neither is permitted to drive.
"I find that bizarre," he said.

Towering Silence

For millennia Zoroastrians have used vultures to dispose of their dead. What will happen when the birds disappear?

Quote of the Day

"Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living."
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

China Insists on Naming Living Buddhas

The things that make you go hmmm....

BEIJING - Ratcheting up its control over Tibetan Buddhism, China on Friday asserted the sole right to recognize living Buddhas, reincarnations of famous lamas that form the backbone of the religion's clergy.

All future incarnations of living Buddhas related to Tibetan Buddhism "must get government approval," the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing the State Administration for Religious Affairs.

Spread of Religion

Religion spread animation (flash animation)

The Spirituality of Parenting

This is a fantastic podcast in which the hostess of "Speaking of Faith" interviews a very wise female rabbi,Sandy Eisenberg Stasso. Even those without children will imo find her insights very valuable...You can also listen to it on your computer if you are not an ipod user...HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

More and more people in our time are disconnected from religious institutions, at least for part of their lives. Others are religious and find themselves creating a family with a spouse from another tradition or no tradition at all. And the experience of parenting tends to raise spiritual questions anew. We sense that there is a spiritual aspect to our children's natures and wonder how to support and nurture that. The spiritual life, our guest says, begins not in abstractions, but in concrete everyday experiences. And children need our questions as much as our answers.

Behind America's Different Perceptions of God

Chck out the graphic in the article: "How we view God"

An extensive survey divided religion into four ways of seeing God, which they say is a better indicator of political and moral attitudes than denomination