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Category: Spiritual

Remedial Reading for So-called Christians

Remedial Reading for So-called Christians

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I might be alone in my interpretation of the unforgivable sin, the sin against the spirit. I’ve always taken it to mean something like invoking God/spirit to authenticate and make authoritative a view or action that directly expresses everything of its opposite. My journey is still very much in process, but it does seem even to me as though some of the people claiming to be christians might really take a new name for themselves. I think “Pharisee” doesn’t even…

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Dehumanizing Ideologies are at the Root of Evil

Dehumanizing Ideologies are at the Root of Evil

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I’ve been thinking a lot about human evil lately, watching some of the strands of contemporary ideology in America, and one of the themes that keeps re-appearing is the dehumanization of other human beings. Once you believe that another human being isn’t fully human, it seems that you somehow feel that any treatment of that subhuman is justifiable. From harassment to shootings to torture, whether the dehumanized happen to be gay or muslim or atheist or brown or female or…

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Heartsong

Heartsong

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Love is not just joy and peace and comfort, but also a broken soul’s plea, a heartsong to the stars. The heart yearns, and reaches out with all its might, to cross a chasm that is at once illusory and unbridgeable. Have you ever felt abandoned by the cosmos, and enfolded in its Love – at the same time? Forsaken and supported? Punished and granted precious gifts? The interpenetration of these is perhaps the very meaning of the life of…

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Remembering the Jehovah’s Witnesses

Remembering the Jehovah’s Witnesses

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I’m not yet ready to write about the loss of my old friend Lee, but I will soon. Learning that he died from complications of a hospital staph infection has brought back thoughts about the congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses in which we both grew up – or… er… started to grow up. As much as I’ve ranted about the Witnesses on this blog, those experiences have given me so many reference points in my own experience that I can’t bring…

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Sharing D.H. Lawrence on the Cosmos

Sharing D.H. Lawrence on the Cosmos

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D.H. Lawrence is most well-known for his loverly novels, but I am most fond of his book “Apocalypse.” I picked it up again when it caught my eye, patiently waiting, wedged between Bataille and Baudrillard – out of order, why? I opened it up to a random page, and found this passage. I loved it so much that I want to share it with you. Perhaps the greatest difference between us and the pagans lies in our different relation to…

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Engagement Balance Decision

Engagement Balance Decision

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No disguise can long conceal love where it is, nor feign it where it is not. ~ François de La Rochefoucauld I’m passionate about certain topics. Some themes in politics and religion and life in general are not matters of disinterested observation but of deep commitment. In the last year, I’ve become very frustrated – angry even – about how malleable people can sometimes be, about how fearful, paranoid and even hateful the manipulated populations can become. Inchoate, thick with…

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