A connection that is not usually made with John’s Gospel in the context of the festivals of Tabernacles and especially of Lights (Hanukah) is the apocalyptic story told in Daniel. This story is set in the time of the Exile; but it was written during the Maccabean uprising and defeat of the Syrian-Greek invaders of the 160s bce.
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With chapter 7 the anti-Semitism that has haunted Christianity for centuries seems to become unavoidable.
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A particularly useful book crossed my desk recently: Bridging the God Gap: Finding Common Ground Among Believers, Atheists, and Agnostics (Living Arts Publications, 2011) by Roger Schriner, a retired Unitarian minister and psychotherapist from Northern California. In it, he describes the wide continuum of nuanced positions between “theism” and “atheism”, blurring the meaning of both terms.
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In Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, thinker and philosopher Rajiv Malhotra addresses the challenge of a direct and honest engagement on differences, by reversing the gaze, repositioning India from being the observed to the observer and looking at the West from the dharmic point of view.
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Malhotra argues for a distinct Indian alternative to the assumption that Western constructs should define and describe the whole world. His book is an eye-opener, if we recognize the inner vision that can see the seldom-examined presuppositions we use to define and categorize the world.
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The kinds of stories the Galilean spirit/sage spins become sacred stories, but not because they have been canonized by any religious authority. Rather, they are extra-ordinarily spiritual tales because they are stories about the sacredness of the ordinary life as revealed to us by the one who taught with a different kind of inner authority. It’s what makes ordinary life so undeniably, unavoidably, deeply, and essentially spiritual. And It is also why ordinary people are as reluctant to relinquish their claim to be “spiritual,” in the most profound sense of the word; just as adamantly as they disavow being “religious,” in the worst sense of that word.
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Most of my life, it is this Jesus in Mark’s gospel that I have encountered, rather than the Jesus of our traditions that tell us he can be found if only we seek him.
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For 21st century activists, from Occupy Wall Street regulars to poets such as Drew Dellinger,theologians such as Spong, Crossan, Borg, and Fox, the way to distributive justice-compassion for all beings on the Planet is our own flesh and blood.
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Borg and Crossan describe the Christmas story as “a subversive parable.” Subversive stories help us see differently. They subvert the conventional ways of seeing. Similarly, parables are metaphors.
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The season of the Solstice is the appropriate time to array our homes, our world, in light. Something deep within us is responding to a desire that seems to come from the heart of the Universe.
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Bonhoeffer treasured Cervantes’ Don Quixote. He believed the beleaguered idealist was an apt metaphor for the Confessing Church.
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Dr. Mic Hunter has spent years assisting people with diverse backgrounds to identify, develop, and apply their spirituality. In his most recent book he focuses on the original principles taught by Jesus without attention to the miraculous aspects of the stories usually associated with him.
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If I Had My Way is a wonderful, fun story about “doing the right thing!”
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There were different types of protest, some more violent than others. But the vast majority of the people were simply there to make a statement. “We are not going to let you get away with this.”
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Yesterday (October 4th, 2011), the protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement channeled Michael Jackson in “Thriller,” dressing up like zombies, complete with fake blood, stupefied stagger and an insatiable appetite for money.
It was blatant political theater of the absurd.
Until the 1870’s economics was an offshoot of moral philosophy. Adam Smith believed in a capitalist economy grounded in a non-capitalist morality. For him, “honesty, thrift, discipline, cooperation, and not consumption and unbridled self-interest were the keys to happiness and social cohesion.”
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In Anh’s Anger, five-year-old Anh becomes enraged when his grandfather interrupts playtime with a summons to the dinner table.
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Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh calls the Anh’s Anger series, “a wonderful gift for both children and adults who want to learn how to turn unhappy situations into joyful ones.”
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