“Baby I’m amazed at the way you pulled me out of time,” sang Paul McCartney during his Wings days. Being pulled out of time was a feeling I experienced throughout a conference entitled “Awakened World 2012: Engaged …

With my heart pounding away, I was asking, “And why am I here?”

“I think that people who are leaving church, or people who call themselves spiritual but not religious, are raising really significant questions about faith, about community life and about the future of religion that religious leaders should pay more attention to,” says religion scholar Diana Butler Bass, author of Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening. Watch more of our interview with her about the religious implications of the rise of the religiously unaffiliated.

TJ Dawe speaks about the goals of his organization, Beams and Struts, and an ideology of compassionate cooperation.

Never forget that you are amazing, just as you are. And so is everyone else.

I am a quasi retired Spiritual Director and Church Consultant within the United Church of Christ (UCC). I am deeply concerned with the fetters of 4th Century “packaging” of Divinity related to the religious challenges of the 21st Century.

I am writing this article at the end of a two week vacation on the lovely Hawaiian island, Maui. My wife and I have tried to plan a trip to Hawaii every year for over 25 years …

“Walking the spiritual path properly is a very subtle process; it is not something to jump into naively. There are numerous sidetracks, which lead to a distorted, ego-centered version of spirituality. We can deceive ourselves into thinking we are developing spiritually when instead we are strengthening our egocentricity through spiritual techniques. This fundamental distortion may be referred to as spiritual materialism.”

But there is another way I believe God and spirit may be experienced: kinesthetically. It is primal and pre-rational, our first encounter with something beyond ourselves. It begins in our mother’s womb, immersed in embryonic fluids, nourished and protected by our mother’s flesh. We feel the pulsing of her heart. On a men’s retreat, I heard the Franciscan Richard Rohr speculate that men’s love of drumming may come from that early memory of our mother’s heartbeat.

I hope it will be a long time from now; I am grateful to be occupying this body today. But when you see this body lying before you in your gross anatomy lab, don’t call it mine. It will be for you, and for all the patients you will serve in your career as a doctor. Cut this body open with deep reverence, not for me, but for the living people whose bodies you will work to heal. My experience of eternal life during the process of my death will transcend this body completely.