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This film explores some major concepts, but two of them are simple: places and spaces. Places are merely physical locations, with often no meaning attached to them. However, a simple, empty room can be formed into a space; turned into a place of meeting, creativity, innovation, and community. Places are often beautiful, awe-inspiring, breathtaking, but they only become spaces when we engage with them. When we experience beauty, peace, or joy from a place, our reflections and responses to the place are what create an experience, as well as the emotions that we feel.
Here’s the problem, when we reflect during an experience, or bring pre-conceived notions to an experience, we arent truly experiencing. Reflection must exclusively follow experience.

I shall argue in this essay that without the mind’s faculty of imagination there would be no philosophy, no art, no music, no mathematics, no science, no religions, and no freedom of choice; that the attempts of religions to limit its expression to habits of identity, aided by the atheistic belief, now common in secular societies, that it must be applied only to material discovery, is the cause of their conflict and religious terrorism; that the crisis in modern education is similarly caused and may be similarly resolved; that the natural function of this faculty is to find manifold ways for minds to communicate, as is demonstrated by its manifestations, as described above; finally, that it is not limited to human minds, for the history of philosophy, which is also the history of humankind, would not be as it is if this were true.

I’m on the road to nowhere
A place that I can find
Beyond my measured thinking,
Beyond my structured mind.

Marcus Borg, Brian McLaren, Diana Butler Bass and Others on Progressive Christianity

Through the lens of evolutionary Christianity, Sanguin works through moral, spiritual, and scientific issues raised in Mad Men, the writings of Richard Dawkins, tales from the Bible, and other stories that inform our views of the world. Sanguin’s reflections will revitalize your faith and leave you celebrating that you don’t need to sacrifice a rational, evidence-based worldview to be a person of faith in the twenty-first century.

Diana Butler Bass, one of contemporary Christianity’s leading trend-spotters, exposes how the failings of the church today are giving rise to a new “spiritual but not religious” movement. Using evidence from the latest national polls and from her own cutting-edge research, Bass, the visionary author of A People’s History of Christianity, continues the conversation began in books like Brian D. McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity and Harvey Cox’s The Future of Faith, examining the connections—and the divisions—between theology, practice, and community that Christians experience today. Bass’s clearly worded, powerful, and probing Christianity After Religion is required reading for anyone invested in the future of Christianity.

At 82, retired and enjoying life, Bishop John Shelby Spong doesn’t have to be the liberal enfant terrible whose pronouncements for gay rights and against traditional dogmas once scandalized Christendom.

If you can
tell me where
I’m going
after I leave here,
I won’t be
going there.

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism. Wallace’s “special theory of ontological relativity” suggests that mental phenomena are conditioned by the brain, but do not emerge from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these dualities, as proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung.

Today, most of the 20 million yoga practitioners in the Western world don’t share yoga’s Eastern cultural or religious grounding, yet they feel—or seek—a spiritual connection from their practice. Examining yoga’s philosophical underpinnings, Sophia Rising reveals how people from any faith can use yoga to create a sacred space inside themselves. Author and yogini Monette Chilson demystifies yoga and explains Sophia– Greek for Wisdom– the iconic face of the feminine divine found in Western religious traditions. Through information and example, she invites readers to listen for the inner voice of Sophia and meld their own spiritual beliefs with their yoga.

Sometimes issues need to be reframed, and it can often be helpful to look outside one’s own tradition for a framework. So for those who may be struggling with similar misunderstandings in their congregations, I offer the Four Yogas as a lens through which to see things differently.

Reflecting on what matters most, both for the church and for Americans, leading biblical scholar and premiere teacher for Protestant churches, Marcus Borg surveys the most significant conversations and personalities that shaped his life, and presents his convictions about the faith and it’s role in the twenty-first century.

Wisdom from 13 Traditions on 9 Universal Themes: Justice, Gratitude, Peace, Service, Compassion, Forgiveness, Healing, Nature, Prayer

Compassionate Activism for Global Healing: New Thought is a spiritually motivated way of life that embraces the ancient wisdom traditions of east and west. We embody the belief that consciousness is elementally creative, reciprocates thought, and thereby shapes all manifestation. Our principles reflect a universal conviction that the community of all life is sacred; our practices of meditation and prayer enhance a worldview promoting reverence for, and service to humanity and planet earth. New Thought is committed to global healing through personal transformation, community-building, interfaith, intercultural, and interdisciplinary understanding, and compassionate activism.

How do we pray to God – who seems not to be God, merciful, loving and delivering – for countless women and men in deepest need? How do we move from thanksgiving for our own lives to intercession for those who innocently suffer destitution or even mass atrocity? As if we would stand with Aaron as he ‘stands between the living and the dead’ to halt the plague (Numbers 16:48), while knowing that at countless times the plague, the tragic agonies, do not stop for so many women, men and children…continuing ‘holocausts’…

When a group of graduates from the European Union School in Culham near Oxford, England, invited him to a reunion for former students and teachers, Colin was greeted with a surprising and career-affirming challenge to write a series of essays to appear on Facebook to “tell the world what you taught us in your classroom.” What more genuine and humbling words could a teacher ever hope to hear than these?

What you are about to read is the faithful product of many long hours and many restless nights devoted to meeting the challenge laid down by his students. What could he say of significance about how to help the children of the world defuse the explosive dynamite of the absolute certainties held and defended by religions and governments and societies the world over that threaten, in the end, to be our collective undoing?

Each birth causes us to wonder
where the spark of life comes from.
Every death makes us wonder
what of that life survives.

What we have done, and who we have been,
remains part of the wider universe long after we are gone.

None of us knows the whole truth about what lies beyond death.
Christians believe that as we journey between life and death,
we are safe in the hands of an infinitely gracious God.

What we do know and believe is that every human life,
with a mind to think and a heart to love,
is an expression of the creative spirit of God.

When we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus,” do we mean to say “Come, you malnourished stranger?”