I note that today is Tenzin Gyatso’s seventy-seventh birthday. I understand he’s mulling whether on his death, sooner or later, to incarnate as the Dalai Lama for a fifteenth time. (As the Chinese have the Panchen Lama safely, as it were, in hand, and he, the Panchen Lama, is the one who actually gets to find the next Dalai Lama, I suspect if the venerable does decide he’s not going to return, things could get messy down here on the... Read more

On this day in 1937 Hormel inflicted spam on the world. Nothing has been the same since… Read more

I just spent a weekend at Empty Nest Zendo in North Fork, California, doing a couple of sessions on aspects of ministry for the Shogaku Institute’s Zen priest training program. I gave one session on basic preaching skills. But, I noticed they had a sheet among other handouts from a session that Peter Schireson had written. I thought it was wonderful. I asked Sensei Shireson’s permission to reprint the basic points, and he graciously consented. For the class session from... Read more

I was talking to friend who was ruminating on how as she’s aged she’s become invisible, in the sense that she no longer attracts sexually oriented attention. I think mostly she was glad. With a lingering sense of how this also is a harbinger of decline and death. As a male I’ve observed how I have moved into a status somewhere between invisible to young women and cute. It’s the cute I don’t think I really like… Yesterday afternoon I... Read more

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In the early middle of the nineteenth century the brilliant, driven, and sometimes monstrous Samuel Gridley Howe, while Director of Perkins School for the Blind, building upon earlier work, particularly the theoretical musings of the philosopher Denis Diderot, and making it his own, discovered the secret of educating the deafblind. His first success was Laura Bridgman, a girl from New Hampshire. She, and with her, Dr Howe and Perkins became world famous. For a time Laura was second only to... Read more

I’ve found myself thinking a lot about the Service of the Living Tradition, where the preacher Vanessa Southern called the Unitarian Universalist community to a new awakening. I think Peter Mayer is the bard of that awakening, the first significant hymnodist of contemporary Unitarian Universalism. The theology he represents in his songs is the deep insight of radical interdependence, which we can find emergent in the twin assertions that the individual is precious beyond description and that individual, we, each... Read more

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