These are difficult days for faith in America.  On one hand, we are experiencing a Great Religious Recession, an end of conventional church; on the other, it seems that nostalgic, fundamentalist, and authoritarian forms of religion are on the rise.

If those are the only options, we are all in trouble.  But, as I explore in my new book, Christianity After Religion, the hints of a new spiritual awakening are all around us.  This awakening, however, is rather different than those in the past.  Not an evangelical event, not based in traditional revivalism, this Great Awakening can be discovered in all faith communities in a new quest for experiential faith.  In order to understand what is happening in American religion, we need to see in new ways.

Check out this interview from Darkwood Brew, as I talk about the contours of a Fourth Great Awakening.  A Great Awakening: Interview with Diana Butler Bass

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day that we remember we come from the earth and shall return to the earth.  Everything is connected.  We live as part of creation, not above or separate from it.

A blue grass song to help you embrace the day–and perhaps think about Ash Wednesday differently than you have in the past.  It isn’t just about personal sin and death, but a reminder that our lives are linked in love as part of God’s joyful ecology of beginnings and endings.  ”Ashes” from the album Sound Theology by Jonathan Rundman:

Ashes