Yesterday Jan & I went to see Independence Day: Resurgence. We knew it was supposed to be a bad movie. Of the one hundred and twenty-five professional reviewers counted on Rotten Tomatoes only thirty-four percent liked it. And, indeed, it is a bad movie. But, the flaw in the reviews could, to my mind, be found in Rotten Tomatoes’ “critics consensus.” “It’s undeniably visually impressive, but like its predecessor, Independence Day: Resurgence lacks enough emotional heft to support its end-of-the-world... Read more

Way back when I was first studying Zen in the San Francisco Bay Area I met the leader of a group called the Kalias Shugendo. If even if a fraction of his claims were true, he led an amazing life. Of course, it has occurred to me that he could have been a fabulist start to finish. Even in those days when I tended to believe anything anyone claimed about themselves, he felt a little off. For example I noticed... Read more

TAPROOTS FOR A NEW UNIVERSALISM Zen Buddhism & Unitarian Universalism, Encounter, Conflict, New Visions James Ishmael Ford 24 June 2016 Delivered as the Conrad Wright Annual Lecture Unitarian Universalist History & Heritage Society At the 2016 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, Columbus, Ohio I never tire of telling this story. In 1844, a chapter from the Sadharmapundarika-sutra, the seminal Mahayana Buddhist text the Lotus Sutra was published in the Boston Transcendentalist journal, the Dial. Best I can tell, this chapter, published... Read more

I’ve been thinking a lot about love of late. I recall an etymological dictionary that suggested the distant ancestor of love was “lub,” a word meaning desire. It kind of works, don’t you think? Of course desire is a dangerous thing, a variation on the very thing that old Gautama Siddhartha marked out as the cardinal cognitive error in human consciousness – grasping, specifically grasping after that which is in motion as if it were permanent. A fool’s chase that... Read more

A few days ago Facebook offered for my consideration and possible reposting a picture from a couple of years ago. What I’m pretty sure the robot that picked it out was unaware of was that it was taken of a stack of copies of a book I’d written that was now being remaindered. If you’re unaware of the term, Wikipedia explains. “Remaindered books are printed books that are no longer selling well and whose remaining unsold copies are liquidated by... Read more

As it happens, it was on this day in 1633 that Galileo Galilei, threatened with torture and worse hanging in the air formally recanted his heretical view that the earth circled the sun. Legend has it that after his formal recantation, which earned him the mercy of a life-time of house arrest instead of the rack and hot irons, he was said to have muttered, “And yet it moves.” That is the interesting thing about science. It is concerned with... Read more

Reinhold Niebuhr was born on this day in 1892. He and his brother H. Richard Niebuhr would become two of the most significant of American Protestant thinkers, whose influence extended deeply into our culture. Speaking of the birthday boy, I think more for the good than ill, although it could be and is argued otherwise. I would add they had a sister, Hulda Niebuhr who would also become a professor of religious education, mostly at the Presbyterian McCormick Theological Seminary... Read more

Just outside the Oval Office hangs a painting depicting the night of December 31, 1862. In it, African-American men, women, and children crowd around a single pocket watch, waiting for the clock to strike midnight and the Emancipation Proclamation to take effect. As the slaves huddle anxiously in the dimly lit room, we can sense how even two more minutes seems like an eternity to wait for one’s freedom. But the slaves of Galveston, Texas, had to wait more than... Read more

It appears that every few years someone or another discovers Jesus spent some time in India and or Tibet before beginning those three years we get in the canonical Gospels. I wrote on this a half dozen years ago, and then again two years ago. It seems time to repeat once again. In fact the primary document addressing those “missing years” before that public ministry is a text originally titled Life of Saint Issa, Best of the Sons of Men.... Read more