Bruce

These are new prayers for a new age. They spark the spiritual imagination back to life and reorient us to a mystical unity with the universe, Spirit, and all of creation.

This book presents the biological principle of emergence and applies it to culture shifting in congregations. The universe knows how to do life from the inside-out. By moving away from cultures of command and control to a more natural organic model, congregations discover the key to their power and the secret to sustained vitality.

This book explores the Christian faith from the perspective of evolutionary spirituality. It looks at the life and teaching of Jesus through this lens. The author asserts that evolution is the fundamental dynamic of our universe, transcending biology, to include culture and consciousness. Jesus himself was tapped into a sacred evolutionary current to transcend, yet include, his own religious lineage. This urge for self and cultural transcendence therefore is an essential element of the Christian faith: there is no final iteration of the Christian faith. Everything, including the Christian faith, is in the process of transcending itself. When we realize the mystical awareness that we are the presence of a sacred evolutionary process awakening to itself, we catalyze the power of what traditionally has been called the Holy Spirit.

What I love about the book is that Thresher writes it with a mystic's consciousness. At times you can practically catch the twinkle in his eye as he writes. But make no mistake, he has attained a mastery, and the accompanying sense of humor, that only somebody who has tasted Spirit directly and knows in heart that all manner of things shall be well. The book is full of wisdom, insight, and most importantly very practical tools for transformation. I can't recommend this book highly enough."

Let’s stop assuming that a collection of individuals constitutes community. It doesn’t. In fact, it usually makes for disaster, as evidenced by the number of conflict resolution experts who are making their living off congregational members who are at each other’s throats. It’s not the fault of congregational members. We need to be teaching what it means to be in community, and that includes practices that are going to make us fit for community. Most of us got our training for community life in dysfunctional families. The moment anything approximating intimacy breaks out in congregations most people simply re-enact largely the unexamined history of our family of origin.

Visit Bruce's Site on Evolutionary Christianity This will be the first Christmas Eve in twenty-seven years that I’m not preaching. I confess to

DECEMBER 4, 2012 BY BRUCE SANGUIN Visit Bruce's Site Here We tend to associate Advent with a season of waiting for the birth

In Darwin and Divinity..., Sanguin has provided a new and exciting paradigm for thinking Christians and spiritual seekers alike. He has provided a basis for a deep theological shift, a fresh cosmology and a new way of perceiving our reality based on excellent scholarship, both scientific and biblical. And he has done that in a very readable way that is open to anyone who yearns to learn. It is on top of our recommended reading list. ~Fred C. Plumer President

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.”

Heaven is a symbolic expression of two complementary yearnings: the longing for perfection in this world, and union with the divine.  We are drawn by the promise of perfection. On an interior level this is felt as the promise of perfect love, happiness, and the ideal relationship. The idea of hell is essentially a symbolic yearning for a moral order in which the good are rewarded and the bad are punished.

We are facing a planetary crisis that is unparalleled in human history. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that we are at a tipping

Poems from an upcoming book by Bruce Sanguin. Author of Emerging Church and Darwin, Divinity, and The Dance of the Cosmos.

We are facing a planetary crisis that is unparalleled in human history. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that we are at a tipping point. Species extinction is accelerating, global warming is melting the polar icecaps at a rate that exceeds all scientific predictions, and our air, water, and soil is rapidly becoming a toxic soup that is ending up in our own bodies. We have only a few years to reorient ourselves and avert a disaster from which there may be no return.

It is my task to speak on ecology, spirituality, and the evolution of consciousness. My intention is to describe the characteristics of an ecological spirituality be for the 21st century. Such a spirituality would transcend, yet include, all traditional religious expressions of spirituality. Each religious tradition, including my own - Christianity - is faced with the challenge of interpreting this ecological crisis through the lens of its tradition and mobilizing its constituency to take action. We either do this, or risk irrelevance. This is what I set out to do in my book, Darwin, Divinity, and the Dance of the Cosmos: An Ecological Christianity. Yet there is a need to broaden the definition of spirituality in a way that speaks to that growing demographic - especially in Cascadia - that define themselves as "spiritual, but not religious".