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This is an excerpt from a book Jim Burklo is writing this summer: MINDFUL CHRISTIANITY. The research he’s doing for this project has taken him deep into the history of Christian spirituality. According to Jim: “The more I learn, the more I have to learn!”

God is my personal consultant. I have it made. She lets me kick back and relax, knowing that with her guidance, everything will go smoothly. She gives me a much-needed boost.

  “If faith communities lead the way in honoring the reality of same-sex marriage, the law will eventually follow.” — Jim Burklo, BIRDLIKE AND BARNLESS, 2008 Oh happy day, Friday, June 26, 2015! — when our dearly …

In this guide to soulful service, Jim Burklo draws from his deep well of experience working with homeless people, leading service-learning programs for university students, and pastoring churches. With touching stories, poetry, and parables, Hitchhiking to Alaska illustrates universal principles about the spirituality of helping relationships.

In my pocket, all my waking day, I carry a device that enables me to communicate instantly with practically anyone around the globe. I’m a cog in a vast international system of manufacturing, trade, and consumption. Sure, we’re all connected in these ways. But in our face-to-face encounters with other people, or when we walk in wilderness and commune personally with other living beings, we sense this connection in a much deeper way.

Starting today, 5/4/15, I’ll be at a conference nearby at Pomona College called Seizing an Alternative: Toward an Ecological Civilization, which will draw about 1,500 participants from around the world, including many from China. I got involved …

Legalization of marijuana and decriminalization of other drugs won’t solve the problems of drug use and abuse. But such a change in policy would reduce the sum of the harm caused by drug use and the war against it. A careful reading of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount reveals what divine love asks of us: a drug policy based on mercy, not on perfection.

  Seven years ago, Cat Moore (on the right, with a cup) took her cappuccino, sat down at a table in the Starbucks on Glendale Boulevard in the Atwater Village neighborhood of Los Angeles, and opened up …

We praise you, God, with rousing song, we answer at your call
Your Word creates the universe, We praise you, God of all
Your Word creates the universe, We praise you, God of all

Kleinbard’s idealism is tempered by realism accrued in his tenure as the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. Having seen Congress in action and inaction, he understands that some things he’d prefer are pies-in-the-sky. In his book he makes a strong economic case for the US to adopt European-style universal single-payer health care, but does not factor this into the proposals in his book. The super-heated right-wing ideology that dominates Congress today has taken off the table the obvious solution to runaway costs and fundamental injustice in our health care system.

On this evening, the discussion turned to the question of what people of different religions do when they lose things. One of our Muslim students spoke up right away. “When I lose my keys, or something else, I do what other Muslims do. I repeat the phrase “ya seen” forty times. And then very often I find what I lost!” I couldn’t help asking: “What does ‘ya seen’ mean?”

  Pluralism Sunday – a project of ProgressiveChristianity.org – was on May 3, 2015   Churches around the world celebrate that other religions can be as good for others as ours is for us, by including music, …

Sanctuary for All Life hallows humans’ relationship to the earth in words that point to a realm beyond words, a Peaceable Kingdom beyond the thrall of kings and states, living a law that trumps all written codes because it is “in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:14). To show the way, Corbett obstinately synthesized the disparate disciplines in which he had steeped himself, from analysis of the range-grasses of the Sonoran desert to dissection of the finer points of the medieval Jewish mysticism of Spain. But what else could we have expected from a Quaker cowboy with a masters in philosophy from Harvard?

The God of Genesis was almost omnipotent. But his extreme potency and his immortal nature prevented him from having the one ability he needed most in order to fully experience and enjoy the companionship of the human beings he had created: vulnerability.

(This is adapted from emails I sent to students, faculty, and staff in the course on mindfulness I’m teaching at the USC Keck School of Medicine, through our Mindful.USC.edu initiative:) Mindfulness: A short course Mindfulness is “paying …

“… remain here, and stay awake with me.” Jesus, Matthew 26: 38 One night of our dog’s life lasted for just a few minutes. Our yellow Labrador, Kai, was playing in our front yard on a sunny …

I’ve spent a certain amount of my life with my head stuck in a jug, convinced that the whole world is dark. For me, mindfulness meditation practice has been the means by which the jug gets pulled off and I’m able to wake to the light.

There is one “Musings” reader whose perspective matters particularly to me. Her name is Roberta Maran, and she happens to be my wife. She read my post last week and when I asked her what she thought, she told me she was disappointed.

The word God evokes highest aspirations. It suggests the whole, and what makes me whole. It delivers me into the rich darkness of mystery, the allure of the unknown. It provokes possibility. It aims beyond what I can explain. The word God invites me beyond what I can imagine. The word God hints at the personality of the universe. It touches me with all-surpassing Love. The word God invokes curiosity, creativity. My uncertainty about what the word God means spins me into a healthy, humbling disequilibrium. It leaves me giddy.

In the beginning is the Word
W-O-R-D
And the Word is with God
And the Word is God
And the Word is the bird
That Jesus talked about

I thoroughly enjoyed the Sunday Assembly. Clearly it addresses a felt need of many people for a community without religious content. I sensed that some folks were there in reaction against religion, but it looked like most were just looking for a wholesome community with which to connect.

(This is the speech I gave at a commemoration of the birthday of Swami Vivekananda at the Vedanta Society in Hollywood on 1-11-15.) Dear Vedanta friends, I share in the reverence that you hold for Swami Vivekananda, …

Out of this house where there is no room
For the little ones that to him belong
(He is weak but he is God)

The day after the first Shabbat in Advent, Mary and Joseph took Jesus, who was eight years old, To the Great Mall of Bethlehem. There, in the middle of the huge indoor shopping complex, Was a stately …

What will be the unifying principle behind this community? Is love and mutual support enough to hang it together? Will some distinctive message or activity or ritual be necessary to give the group an identity and a reason to continue gathering? The experiment is just getting started. The evidence and the conclusions are not in. Meanwhile, Bart’s experiment has the attention of secular humanists nationwide. He’s not a theist any more, but he’s not a normal atheist, either.

Quickened by my attention to what surrounded me
As I sat on one of the pale yellow rounded boulders in the creekbed.

American-born Muslim young people, growing up post 9/11, are more marked as just-plain-Muslims than they are as Ismaili or Sunni or Shia or Ahmadjyya or Sufi Muslims. Or Turkish or Syrian or Jordanian or Saudi Muslims. They’ve been thrust into a wide realm of choice by historical circumstance. There’s no one way to do their faith, and for some this opens the door to creative expressions of their religion.

Mindful Christianity is mysticism: the experience of a human being in spiritual union with the divine, seeing each other with the same eye. The observer within you, when you are deep in mindfulness meditation, is God. God is lovingly attentive toward your every experience, every feeling, urge, and thought. In mindfulness practice, God notices all of that is going on inside of you, with deep compassion and without judgment.

The Supreme Court has declared corporations to be people, according to its Citizens United decision. And, likewise, in its Hobby Lobby decision, it decided that a company can be exempted from obeying laws that contradict his/her personal …

As public speakers, you can reverse this history and bring life back to language. You can breathe vitality into words and send them forth to change the world. With the spoken word you can reach into the souls of other people and stir them to new visions and actions.

Today, over 2,000,000 Americans are in jail or in prison. We’ve got 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners. More black men are under the control of the criminal justice system in America today than were enslaved before the Civil War began. Our prison-industrial complex has become the latest of a long series of forms of systematic oppression against people of color. Lawyer and activist Michelle Alexander rightly calls it “The New Jim Crow” in her recent book.

We come to the desert at least as much for what is not here as much as for what is. Monastics of every religion are drawn to it. Moses encountered God in a bush on a desert mountain. The first theologians of Christianity were known as the Desert Fathers. In wilderness they prayed, meditated, contemplated – uncluttering their hearts and minds in an uncluttered space. Mohammed went to a desert cave and there he waited until the Angel Gabriel dictated the Koran to him. Around the same time, Buddhist monks retreated to the mountainous deserts of Central Asia to meditate.

For the freedom of the air
that absorbs the smoke of hand-rolled cigs

In the name of the Father,
in the name of the Mother,
source of life,
from whom water flows,
to whom water returns,

We live not for ourselves alone, but toward God and for each other. Our lives are bound in a covenant of love.

Michael Brown should not have been shot dead by police in Ferguson, Missouri. His hands were up. He was unarmed. It doesn’t make any difference whether or not he had stolen earlier something that day. If he had committed such a crime, he should have been given appropriate justice, not a volley of bullets. At the time he was shot, there was simply no excuse for what happened to him. Somebody else had his life stolen from him, too: a man named Jesus, killed for no good reason. Jesus also died with his hands up. He had been ethnically profiled by the Roman occupying army in Jerusalem, and was brutally murdered on a cross.