Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Although the social structures in the contemporary world are less rigid than in ancient cultures, there are still many pre-established functions or roles that people readily identify with and which thus become part of the ego. This causes human interactions to become inauthentic, dehumanized, alienating. Those pre-established roles may give you a somewhat comforting sense…
“Part of the problem is the dualistic way that we have conceptualized human beings through most of Christian history. Simply, this holds that human beings are made up of two (dichotomy) or three (trichotomy) distinct parts, one physical (body) and one spiritual (soul, spirit, mind). In either di- or tri- models, death is the breaking…
““The Mother is chasing you,” he said, “and you must surrender to Her…She calls to everyone, and to ignore Her is to ignore the greatest gift you may ever be offered: the passionate embrace of the Mother. She is going to hound you until She has you, and then She is going to strip you…
“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” — Isaiah 45:7 I’ve been listening and reading a lot about the Devil in relation to Christian theology lately. Yesterday I listened to the “Devilpalooza” episode of Homebrewed Christianity which featured Richard Beck talking about…
“We don’t really fit the categories of the West, and I’m ok with that. The Torah calls us an ‘Am,’ which loosely translates ‘a people,’ but it’s a Hebrew term, it has its own valence. So, Judaism is a nexus of history, religion, peoplehood, culture, shared destiny…I think in some ways, ethnicity rose again in…
I remember sitting with my wise old Rabbi once and hearing a baby scream. He looked at me and said, “Did you ever notice how babies come into the world with their tiny fists clenched?” “Yes,” I said. “Do you know how our sages explain that? They say that babies, not knowing any better, clench…
Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given…
“The rabbis, when they read, walk into the text. They bring themselves to it and step across the edge of the scroll onto its body, bouncing a little, believing it will hold their weight. And then on hands and knees crawl through the furrows of words, examining, brushing away dirt, not unlike a botanist examining…
I read two blog posts recently written by Richard Beck (1, 2) in which he reviews and summarizes a book that sounds extremely interesting. It is a book entitled The Depth of the Riches: A Trinitarian Theology of Religious Ends by S. Mark Heim that deals with the issue of Religious Pluralism. I can say…
I searched for the root meaning of the word “Religion” and found what I knew I would find: Might we consider ‘re’ + ‘ligare’ (Latin) so to imply that the essence and most noble purpose for any religion is “To reconnect”, such a reunion repairing the illusion of separation, of being torn from the whole,…