The St Thomas Collective provides a safe community for Biola students/alumni who find themselves doubting, frustrated, and spiritually homeless.

Since 1936 the Lemurian Fellowship, headquartered in Ramona, California, has spread these teachings to individuals longing to fulfill their true place in life, build noble character, and find inner peace and satisfaction.

Though I am gone, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe.

A life with renewed purpose, healthy spirituality, embodied values, meaningful connection with others, and hope for a more just future. I write, speak, podcast, and build community surrounding faith shifting issues and anxieties. I want to build the world I want to live in—together, with you.

s a progressive Christian, how do you deal with infidelity when your partner cheats on you but later confesses it?

Conscious Aging organizations encourage elders to contribute their time, energy, wisdom, and experience in “giving back” to the world. So when I retired, I was surprised by how much resistance I felt to getting involved.

The book begins with the author’s father—and the author himself— dealing with the death of wife and mother. It continues with the author’s powerful encounter with his dying father, then proceeds with poems mourning his father’s death and its aftermath. The second half of the book contains poems which remember and honor significant people and experiences in the author’s life. As a pastoral psychotherapist, the author finds the Bible and spirituality to be major healing resources, along with memories of some key people he writes about who have helped him grow and heal in his life. What happens in writing is a mysterious and awesome thing, and the very process of remembering and writing these poems has helped the author mourn and find some healing.

challenges readers to develop a faithful response to climate change, which disproportionately harms the poor, threatens future generations, and damages God’s creation. This book uses scripture, tradition, reason, and experience to explore the themes of creation and justice in the context of the earth’s changing climate. By creatively employing these four sources of authority, readers discover a unique way to assess the physical realities of climate change, discern its physical and spiritual implications, reflect on planetary warming theologically and discern a faithful response.

Today marks the first Sunday of Lent, a time of self-reflection and lament. It is often considered a season of darkness. Something I am all too familiar with. The season of Lent reminds me of walking a labyrinth. A labyrinth is a path that requires you to go in and come out the same way in which you entered. It is a journey towards the center, then back out again, into the world to which you came. You cannot skip the part you did not like, or go around a difficult feeling, you must return the exact way you entered. But, even though the path does not change, you have, and in this we find new life.

I distinguish between the “gift” of celibacy and the “call” to celibacy, which I will come to later in this post. The gift of celibacy is a debatable proposition. Is someone “blessed” with that gift or simply avoiding intimate relationships? Is it a rejection of God’s gift of sexuality and more broadly sensuality and embodiment, or a prioritizing of one’s energy and involvement and commitment?

What Happened: On November 8, 58% of voting-age citizens cast ballots in the presidential election. In 2008, when Obama was elected, 64% cast ballots. When all the ballots are counted, Clinton will have won the popular vote by at least a million. Trump won the electoral college by squeaking ahead in some of the swing states: he was only 68,236 ahead in Pennsylvania, for example.

An ethical will, or legacy letter, is a way to share your values, blessings, life’s lessons, hopes and dreams for the future, love, and forgiveness with your family, friends, and community.

Another way that religion can do a body good is through the mindfulness practices that are embedded in it. It's no news that it's part of Buddhism. But for most Christians, it may come as a surprise to find that it has always been integral to contemplative prayer. You can't confess the truth of your heart unless you know what's in it.

In "The Spiritual Child", psychologist Lisa Miller presents the next big idea in psychology: the science and the power of spirituality. She explains the clear, scientific link between spirituality and health and shows that children who have a positive, active relationship to spirituality: * are 40% less likely to use and abuse substances * are 60% less likely to be depressed as teenagers * are 80% less likely to have dangerous or unprotected sex * have significantly more positive markers for thriving including an increased sense of meaning and purpose, and high levels of academic success.

Against or Through? With or For? But or And? Skits for worship

If I were to condense a definition of mindfulness into a single word, agape would be the one. Every time I teach a five-week mindfulness course for students and staff at USC, I introduce the class with a simple definition of the state we are trying to reach in the practice: a loving awareness of thoughts, feelings, sensations, urges in the present moment, while letting go of judgments about them.

"Love the sinner, but hate the sin." This phrase has been used countless times by some Christians to pretend to offer welcome to LGBT people while condemning the natural consequence of the way God made them. It speaks for a shallow kind of love at most: one that claims to be okay with a person's same-sex orientation while stigmatizing its fulfillment. This noxious phrase also summarizes the underlying attitude of many people of other religions towards sexual minorities. It is a phrase whose time has come - and gone. More than ever, it needs to be excised from the vocabulary of faith, once and for all, as it pertains to homosexuality.

Many saints of the Church’s history appear to have had contempt for their own bodies. The mortifications to which they subjected their flesh are incomprehensibly grotesque to Christians today. It is hard to reconstruct the cultural milieu in which these mortifications had meaning and purpose. There is a lingering disdain of the body still evident in most branches of the faith, and it is problematic. For too long we have viewed our faith as just a head-trip. We Christians need to take better care of the rest of ourselves, and to embody our spirituality more fully.

But why not all of them? Surely that’s the biblical answer to the “how many can we take?” question. Every single last one.

Somewhere down where we don't like to go, is a place where racism lives. It's automatic and hidden. Binding and resistant to change. No matter how well-meaning we are, no matter how open-minded. Like the "root kit" on a computer, racism is hidden and operating without our knowledge.

Re: the Oregon mass shooting: "Harper-Mercer's mother, Laurel Harper, shared her son's passion for guns... I was so appalled by the Roseburg incident that I needed to deal with my despair by flying my fingers across my computer keyboard. This is the result – a spoof on the absurdity of owning guns for self-defense:

The Pope Effect brought throngs of Catholics and admirers out to see him wave to them from his Pope-mobile and to hear him celebrate Mass. And his effect not only brought Republican John Boehner of Ohio to tears, but it also brought Boehner to the realization he should step down as House Speaker. However, for many religious conservatives the Pontiff’s remarks and actions during his visit were viewed as heretical, desecrating century-old church doctrine, and diminishing his authority as the head of the church.

What follows is the text of a “sermon” that I gave as a “congregational reflection” to an all White audience at the Bethel Congregational United Church of Christ on Sunday, June 28th. The sermon was begun with a reading of The Good Samaritan story, and this wonderful quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Credit for this speech goes to Chaédria LaBouvier, whose “Why We Left” inspired me to speak out about racism; to Robin DiAngelo, whose “White Fragility” gave me an understanding of the topic; and to Reni Eddo-Lodge who said “Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race” long before I had the courage to start doing it again.

Pope Francis and the Environment: Yale Examines Historic Climate Encyclical. What follows are the transcripts from the Panel on the Papal Encyclical held at Yale University on April 8, 2015.

American novelist William Faulkner wrote in his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” As we all try to move away from America’s racial past, this recent massacre reminds us of it. For decades now, America has refused to broach the topic of white privilege. During Black History Month in 2009, then-US Attorney General Eric Holder offered an explanation as to why.

The words of Bree Newsome rang out across the capital, “In the name of Jesus, this flag must come down.” Having scaled up the flag pole, Newsome did what many have been asking for since the shooting at Emmanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina. Newsome took action into her own hands and the symbol of an African-American woman removing the confederate flag that has flown over the state since the time of Jim Crow was a powerful action of resistance, power and pride.

It was a very good week for our nation. I rejoice in it, welcome it and give thanks to God for it. The world and the church have the opportunity today to be more profoundly Christian than we were able to be just last week. That is a powerful and a welcomed realization. John Shelby Spong

In my pocket, all my waking day, I carry a device that enables me to communicate instantly with practically anyone around the globe. I'm a cog in a vast international system of manufacturing, trade, and consumption. Sure, we're all connected in these ways. But in our face-to-face encounters with other people, or when we walk in wilderness and commune personally with other living beings, we sense this connection in a much deeper way.

An aging Vietnam vet suffering from PTSD returns to Da Nang after 50 years in order to try to do something for those still afflicted generations later by the lingering toxic affects of Agent Orange. His nagging conscience leads to a redemptive act of self-healing and a common good. Spirituality is often an amorphous and bandied about term that too often connotes the merely religious type, as somehow distinct from those who are not. Instead, I appreciate something as equally shared as it is often neglected, namely the human conscience and our sometimes-belated conscious awareness of it.

Disillusioned with organized religion, some people escape into New Age movements, and others retreat from spirituality altogether. A more satisfying and transformative option is to embark on a quest to discover God on your own. Using time-tested tools of spiritual investigation, you can examine your present beliefs, explore the nature of God and your sense of self and ultimately expand your identity.