Embracing a new universalism We find our completeness in knowing that we are woven out of each other and the cosmos itself. By James Ishmael Ford The spiritual tradition of Unitarian Universalism is rich. We are children of the West, heirs to the biblical traditions of Judaism and especially of Christianity. Just as truly, we are profoundly marked by the wisdom traditions of Athens and by earth-centered spiritualities. Because of our radical openness to both theism and nontheism, first humanists... Read more

The violinist Itzhak Perlman was born on this day in 1945. One of the more beautiful memories I have of my years out here in New England is a time Jan and I and several friends were at Tanglewood and I got to see and hear the master in person. And both of these things, my memory of Tanglewood and the fact this is Perlman’s birthday reminds me of that inspirational, but sadly, also, apocryphal story of Perlman losing one... Read more

It was on this day in 1955 that fourteen year old African American Emmett Till was brutally tortured and murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman in Mississippi. Pictures of what they did to the boy are available through a simple google search. The horror was magnified when an all white, all male jury acquitted the perpetrators, and we know they were because they later admitted it to Look Magazine. All of this was so terrible and at the... Read more

Just, well, just ’cause… Read more

There is, and appropriately so, a great interest in living into the Dharma through the interwebs. Lots going on. Many people offering what they have to offer. And, of course, people should be wary and careful. The web is wide open. Anyone with a computer and a modem… So, pirates and frauds. People with more notions than skills. And, credentialed guides with differing skill sets. All equally far and equally near. The one spot I consistently recommend people looking for... Read more

On this day in 1835 the New York newspaper, The Sun, began a series of six articles that reported the discovery of a civilization on the moon by the renowned astronomer Sir John Herschel. While the true authorship has never been conclusively determined, and various names have been floated, as well as co-conspirators, in all likelihood it was the work of an English journalist Richard Adams Locke. Puts contemporary Facebook hoaxes to shame… And, interestingly, sufficiently spectacular and opening so... Read more

I have a friend who is an old Zen hand. Okay, lots of my friends are old Zen hands. This one has been engaged in the project for several decades, sat with most of the prominent teachers of our time, and has in fact completed the formal Harada Yasutani curriculum with one of them. He and I are visiting the cases from the beginning one more time. It’s a leisurely affair, where we touch on the traditional points but we... Read more

I read on Wikipedia that it was on this day in 1902 that Theodore Roosevelt was the first president of the United States to take a ride in an automobile. Digging a bit deeper I see that in fact that honor goes to William McKinley, who took his ride in a Stanley Steamer in 1900. What Roosevelt did was use it for publicity purposes, as part of kicking off a public tour of New England. He began it with this... Read more

I was driving into the office this morning when I learned from NPR that B. K. S. Iyengar died yesterday. He was ninety-five. Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was born in 1918, and became one of the first of the modern teachers of Yoga in the West and remained until his death among the foremost of those teachers. Yoga in the west has been garnering some criticism for wandering rather far from its spiritual roots, and no doubt some of the... Read more

It was on this day in 1858 that the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London published two articles, one by Charles Darwin and the other by Alfred Russel Wallace, both outlining the principles of natural selection. Some like to make much of Wallace and whether he “deserved” the credit for the discovery. It does appear while Darwin had made the observation first, and shared this privately with a number of people, he was unwilling to walk... Read more