By way of this self-paced course, one can improve one’s capacity to:
Define dialogue, and apply it to one’s daily life.
Use critical thinking about an issue of importance.
Demonstrate increased knowledge of one’s own worldview and that of another person.
Recognize the difference between a stereotype and a generalization and learn to deconstruct a stereotype to defuse prejudice and construct useful, respectful generalizations.
Act with creativity and compassion.

So, don’t mistake the liberal tendency towards tolerance (which allows you – in broad strokes – to believe what you want and do what you please) to remain silent when what you believe and advocate fails to respect the rights or freedom of others. You can claim that your “stand” is the definitive interpretation of what the Bible says, but so did the slave-owning, sexist, and racist Christians of the past – and so do the discriminatory, misogynistic dogmatists of today.

By Dr. Susan Corso
I like to think of Andrew Harvey as one of the intellectual bad boys of the modern spiritual path. Bless the man, he’s almost always a curve or two ahead of the pack. His latest book, The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism is no exception.

Harvey has been through tough times in his life: Finding his guru, her agonizing betrayal, telling the truth about it to name just a few. He’s been on the Path of the Divine Feminine since before most spiritual seekers had even heard of it.

There’s no one answer to a question like this; it depends on the person, the context, and the way in which the information is communicated. There does have to be enough awareness so the issue is taken seriously, but not so much as to cause people to despair. It’s important that people can find hope in the face of uncertainty about climate change.

For many people, their spiritual life is a place where they are the frog.
Many people know that their spiritual life needs tending to.
But, like the frog, they have decided to take action without actually doing so.

Perhaps, with regard to your spiritual life, you feel like the fish or Plato.
Maybe you feel that tending to your spiritual life is a matter of life and death.

A beautiful life is the natural result of acknowledging the things we want, developing insights into the habits that disallow them, practicing a new paradigm, and allowing these new realizations to integrate into our daily lives. There’s no secret maneuver to it, but it does take practice, because most of us have learned to hold joy at quite a distance. LifeMath is about bridging that gap using the four key components above.

In his World Peace Day Message for 2017 Pope Francis states, “To be true followers of Jesus today also includes embracing his teaching about nonviolence.” This is a fine example of a bishop being what a bishop is commissioned to be by Jesus (Mt 28:19). He is teaching the disciples of Jesus “to obey all that I have commanded you.”

This handy interfaith toolkit is full of useful resources and provides a bird’s eye view of interfaith activity in the United Kingdom. Themes touched on include why dialogue?, dialogue practicalities, dialogue on difficult issues, dialogue over food, limits to dialogue and bi-lateral, tri-lateral & multi-lateral dialogue.

This week I speak with Sir Lloyd Geering, New Zealand theologian and pioneering Christian post-theist. In 1967, Geering was charged with heresy by the Presbyterian Church in New Zealand. He successfully withstood this challenge and has continued writing and speaking about religion and holy texts as a human constructions and words like “God” and “faith” as referents of human self-understanding and growth. He is the author of many books and articles, a few of which can be found in the links below.

Robin Meyers Interview – What does a thriving christian community look like to you?

The campaign cry of “make America great again” presumes that there was some halcyon time of American greatness that has been lost. Given our history of slavery, segregation, discrimination, unprovoked wars, and class disparity it is clear that unless you were white, male, and wealthy, America’s greatness is not something from the past wanting to be restored, but it is something yet to be realized in our potential future. America could be great but becoming great depends upon our willingness to make substantive changes in the direction of giving both freedom and justice to all.

These questions were put to me by an Italian philosopher on the occasion of the publication of my book on education, The A.W.E. Project: Reinventing Education, Reinventing the Human, into Italian. I felt they were deserving of sharing with an American audience as well.

Hardly a day goes by when I do not encounter at least one article bemoaning the “tragedy” brought upon us by smart phones and social media. If you believe the hype, today’s youth are going to hell in a hand basket, lured by the incessant clicking and swiping of their ever-evolving digital devices. We are losing our very ability to interact with the people around us, these doomsday prophets warn.

“We live in an era that requires us to radicalize what ‘church’ means.” So writes Timothy Murphy, who argues that “church” should no longer be a noun, an entity, or an object, but rather an activity—what he calls churching; that is, a process of practicing discipleship with others in the way of Jesus.

I don’t think it’s any secret that the institutional church, especially in developed countries, is dying. The worst part: the leaders don’t seem to know how to revitalize it. What are your feelings?

Alejandro Inarritu drops a depth-charge into the souls of all who experience Carne y Arena. And he cuts a new trail in the desert of Hollywood toward a promised land of kindness and justice. Let us walk it through political action for protecting the undocumented in our midst, and let us follow him in employing this entertainment technology for social and spiritual progress.

An institution is a humanly created means to achieve an end. All the activities within it are designed by human beings to reach that end. An institution is like a hammer. It is a tool devised by humans to do a job. But, the hammer in order to do the job for which it was developed, e.g. put a nail in a piece of wood, must be employed according to its own intrinsic logic. The handle is held and the head of the hammer hits the top of the nail. To use a hammer contrary to its own logic, for example, to hold the head of the hammer and hit the side of the nail with the handle, is to misuse the tool and render it ineffective to achieve the end for which it was created. Once the tool is chosen its intrinsic logic must be obeyed. 

What teaching of Jesus inspire you the most?