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Category Archives: Religion

Sayings of the Desert Fathers.

13-Sep-09

buy prednisone for my dog Abbot Pambo questioned Abbot Anthony saying: What ought I to do?  And the elder replied: Have no confidence in your own virtuousness.  Do not worry about a thing once it has been done.  Control your tongue and your belly. An elder said: The reason why we do not get anywhere is that we do not […]

Thomas Merton’s Wisdom of the Desert.

13-Sep-09

order Lurasidone online From the introduction to his collection of sayings of the Desert Fathers: We cannot do exactly as they did.  But we must be as thorough and as ruthless in our determination to break all spiritual chains, and cast off the domination of alien compulsions, to find our true selves and develop our inalienable spiritual liberty […]

Richard Rohr comes to New York.

13-Sep-09

This coming week Richard Rohr will be visiting New York.  Rohr is a Franciscan, and while I’ve never met him personally, in the tapes of his lectures – particularly his astonishing work on Paul – my reaction is always, “This man is preaching the Gospel, the same message as Christ’s, in a modern form.”  It’s […]

Actors, Pretenders.

28-Aug-09

I used to be very into the Christian concept of “polyglossia” – that the Gospel is translatable and works well in any language – in contrast, say, to the Islamic idea that God really can only express himself the way he really wants in one language.  But recently I’ve been more intrigued by the things […]

Helen Luke’s Way of Discrimination.

26-Aug-09

“Seems, madame? Nay it is; I know not seems.” – Hamlet Helen Luke is not one of the easier writers to write about. She appeared as a guide in my life when I began to feel the difference between exterior and interior, fact and meaning, appearance and reality. These distinctions are not for everyone nor […]

Solitude and Meeting.

17-Aug-09

I have written before about spending several months alone in a cabin in the Catskill Mountains of New York. A friend asked me, “After you’ve spent so much time alone, how does that change your life when you’re not alone? Do you bring the fruits of your solitude with you down to the city?” I […]

At Antietam.

19-Jul-09

“When I think of the battle of Antietam, it seems so strange.  Who permits it?  To see or feel that a power is in existence that can and will hurl masses of men against each other in deadly conflict – slaying each other by the thousands, mangling and deforming their fellow men – is almost […]

Male Spirituality.

10-Jul-09

Some people have asked me what the “male spirituality” category on the website refers to. Putting a gender on spirituality seems at best unnecessary, and maybe silly or exclusionary. Nor have I written a great deal on this topic, as I have less than a year’s worth of experience with it, and with all things […]

Reaction to the Obama Cairo Speech.

05-Jun-09

I sat myself down in Claryville on a cloudy, cold summer afternoon and watched the Obama Cairo speech beginning to end, and then read some of the internet reactions. My short reaction is that Obama is a poster child for the importance of personal spiritual development.  For the most part, the existence of these spiritually […]

Obama’s Cairo Speech.

05-Jun-09

I thought about this a lot as I heard older folk talk about the presidential campaign: what a gift the internet is, to deliver us from what used to be called journalism.  Here’s the full video and transcript of the Obama speech in Cairo.  It’s quite extraordinary if looked at in full. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/06/02/us/politics/200900604_OBAMA_CAIRO.html