It was on this day in 1968 that the American Cistercian monk Thomas Merton, who had been attending an interfaith monastic conference in Bankok, Thailand, stepped out of his bath and apparently reached and touched an electric fan, was shocked and suffered a fatal heart attack. By coincidence it was the twenty-seventh anniversary of his entrance into Gethsemane Abbey not far outside of Louisville, Kentucky. The author of the best selling spiritual memoir Seven Storey Mountain, followed by many other... Read more

The great John Milton was born on this day in 1608. Milton was a disputant, a man of letters, at one point a bureaucrat, a theological and political speculator, but most of all a poet. Considered one of the greatest produced within the bounds of Great Britain, one or two consider him their greatest. Me, I like Milton’s theological speculations. He rejected the trinity and was a principal in publishing an English edition of the Racovian Catechism. He appears to... Read more

Gautama Siddhartha lived somewhere between the sixth and fourth centuries before the common era near what today is the border between India and Nepal. He had some experiences, and he taught, he preached sermons that were memorized and no doubt polished by those who transmitted them, and then polished some more. Finally, some four hundred or so years after these words were spoken, they started being written down, principally in two languages, Pali and Sanskrit. Neither was the language he... Read more

I was born in 1948, one of the first wave of what was originally called the Baby Boom, and today is generally reduced to “Boomer.” Well, often some epithet or other is attached at the front. A feature of growing up in the nineteen fifties and early sixties was the ubiquitous observance of this day. Our parents after all were launched into a terrible war at this moment. Of course, for those who analyze such, this was more a marker... Read more

A talk on the good life by Robert Waldinger, a Boundless Way Zen priest and psychiatrist, who directs the Harvard Study of Adult Development as Massachusetts General Hospital. Read more

Because sometimes Rumi is all the inspiration you need. So, thank you Aliasghar Rahimi and your Roohafza Ensemble for showing us what it can look like! Read more

Just, well, just ’cause… Read more

These are times to try people’s hearts. With this week’s terrible shooting rampage in California, those who have been offering prayers but otherwise discounting the deaths in the so many mass shootings in our country over the past few years finally have something to dig their teeth into. There have been, I understand somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty mass shootings in the country since the first of the year. But this was a bit different. In... Read more

It was on this day in 1927 that two old silent movie pros Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy first appeared together in the short Putting Pants on Phillip. While the characters they would settle into had not yet jelled, the spark was obvious. And the rest, as they say, is history… Read more

It was on this day in 1763 that the Touro Synagogue was dedicated in Newport, Rhode Island. It appears the first Jewish families arrived in Newport in 1658 and began worshiping in family homes for the next century. While never a large community Touro’s little Orthodox congregation has continued to this day in that same building, now the oldest synagogue building in the country, and the only dating to the colonial period. It is a National Historic Site. When we... Read more