(First in a series.) Why is Meditation hard? The simple answer, say my colleagues Jon and Linda Caswell, is, If you can close your eyes, you can meditate.
Here’s what they says: The meditation that my wife Linda and I practice and have taught for 15 years is not hard. It can be summed up in four words: Sit still; do nothing.
It is the essence of easy. If you can close your eyes, you can do this. Continue reading
Move over beliefnet. Hello patheos.com. Like beliefnet.com, Patheos is dedicated to “balanced views of religion and spirituality, and strives to offer viewers the expertise on an astounding array of issues. However beliefnet has expanded into a variety of commercial content including healthcare, diet and lifestyle tips. Visit patheos.com, or check out the summary below.
Patheos, in contrast, strives to stay more scholarly. According to Wikipedia, Patheos was founded in 2008 by Leo and Cathie Brunnick, both web technology professionals and residents of Denver, Colorado. Leo, a non-practicing Catholic, and Cathie, a Lutheran-turned-Evangelical, started the project the week they were married as they tried to blend their families. Having living among various faiths they amassed hundreds of essays and works from around 200 scholars into a “religion library” that they wanted to become the “WebMD of religion and spirituality.” As a start-up, early employees included religious-studies scholars.
Since then, says the Denver Post, “The Brunnicks spent months courting theologians, from Harvard Divinity School to the Denver Seminary, to contribute to their site. The result … is an online library of accurate, balanced and peer-reviewed information; side-by-side comparisons of religious traditions; directory of worship houses and other religion-related activities; a forum for discussion and debate called the Public Square; and a series of portals to online faith communities and more forums.”
The name Patheos combines “path” and “theos,” the Greek word for god. Patheos tries to stand on middle ground between academia (which is credible, yet dry), popular media (which is consumable, yet shallow), and faith sites (which are passionate, yet biased).Founder Leo Brunnick called it “the ESPN of Religion.”
Beliefnet founder Steven Waldman observed that Patheos is used for learning about other religions, while people use beliefnet to explain their own religion. That’s why, says Waldman, “Patheos may be well supported among those whose religions have been broadly misunderstood.”
Beliefnet is still the largest-circulation website in religion and spirituality. Waldman conceived of the idea in 1998 and teamed up with magazine publisher Robert Nylen to launch beliefnet.com in 1999. During Waldman’s tenure, beliefnet became the leading spirituality website and won numerous editorial and web awards, including the National Magazine Award for General Excellence online.
Purchased by News Corp, then sold to online spirituality media conglomerate BN in June 2010, beliefnet has broadened its scope with forays into healthcare ecards, discussions, quizzes, meditations, prayers, “Soulmatch.” You can still find great content on beliefnet, you just have to wade through the advertising, pitches and popups. Read more
My wife ran across this great testimony on spirituality.com. It’s a very clear explanation, step by step, of how to pray for safety, from Elizabeth Pond, a war correspondent who was captured by the Khmer Rouge in Vietnam in the ’60s.
“On one level,” she writes, “I was terrified. But at the deepest level, I was drinking in the angel-borne truths that flooded my consciousness, Continue reading
From “evolutionary Christian” Bruce Sanguin – There is still a lot of confusion out there around the distinction between God being “a” person and God being personal. Sanguin writes in a recent column on his If Darwin Prayed website, how he navigates the difference in his thinking.
It’s a helpful way to explain to atheistic thought as well as Christian perspectives both “progressive” and “traditional.”(Gotta love those labels!)
“Progressives want to dissociate themselves completely from the mythic Old Man In the Sky of the Bible who intervenes episodically to rescue us,” Sanguin writes. “This is also the God that atheists reject . . . Real Christians believe that God, and any other image is just a watered-down attempt to save religion from modernism, but is nothing more than a stop-gap measure. These atheists are quite determined to freeze God at this stage of spiritual intelligence, thus giving them an easy target.
“A solution to the problem arises when it’s looked at through an evolutionary lens,”says Sanguin. Read his column on If Darwin Prayed.
This patheos.com blog summarizes the results of a half dozen reputable surveys that tell us the answer is between 3% and 5%.
Of course, it depends on how you define “atheist.” Which depends on how you define “God.” And I believe that the gold is not in the actual answer but in the dialogue that surrounds these questions. And we realize once more that “words don’t mean; people do.”
Like what’s the difference between atheists and agnostics? And among people who do believe in God, there’s a wide range of beliefs as well as certainty in those beliefs.
Are we talking about social identification rather than people’s actual beliefs? Some people who believe that God does not exist do not think of themselves as atheists.
And agnostics may believe in God but consider God unknowable. Others may “believe” in God, but not in the sense of having faith and following him as a guiding force. Read the blog at Patheos.com.
This relatively slim book (200 pages) provides a simple primer, through the lens of a Christian scholar, to better understand the universality in major world faiths. The book is a great starter for a progressive Christian to start the journey to understand the difference between religion to spirituality. and it’s a quick read – under 200 pages. And it is more: The book also points out three “barriers” of human nature that any denomination eventually faces that can trade in spiritual growth and relevance for stagnation and rigidity.
Is God a Christian?, by R. Kirby Godsey (Mercer University Press, 2011) is the journey of a devout Christian scholar from a narrow belief to a more universal spirituality. Continue reading
Update: More research on the power of prayer. In this Huffington Post Blog, journalist Richard Schiffman does a nice job summing up why prayer is the most popular and effective alternative medicine. Read Why People Who Pray Are Healthier Than Those Who Don’t
Published in 2009, The Living Matrix: A Film on the New Science of Healing still is an excellent dvd overview featuring nearly 20 advanced thinkers and researchers in biology, psychology, healthcare. Includes the Noetic Institute’s Marilyn Mandala Schlitz, Brice Lipton and others. Great for small groups to stimulate discussion. Visit www.thelivingmatrixmovie.com for trailers and more info.
Robert Bellah, one of America’s most distinguished sociologists, caps off his luminous academic career with Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, a painstakingly researched book (800 pages) that delves deep into the roots of humankind’s encounter with mystery and the search for meaning.
Underwritten in part by funding from the John Templeton Foundation, Bellah’s book, out recently from Harvard University Press, is the fruit of 13 years of research and analysis. Guided by the latest findings in the biological and social sciences, Continue reading
In the November-December issue of Explore Journal, columnist Stephen Schwartz offers “Meditation–The Controlled Psychophysical Self-Reguluation Process that Works.” Schwartz offers a sound primer on the practice and effectiveness of meditation, the emerging evidence on the lasting effects meditation has on our neuroanatomy, particularly our brains.
Meditation = prayer? Schwartz defines “meditation” by quoting Harvard’s Dr. Herbert Benson, MD, who has Continue reading