It’s Jerry Lee Lewis‘ birthday! Read more

I opened my Facebook page to be treated with a quote attributed to the new age guru Eckhart Tolle, “Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.” I thought, my goodness, I guess, okay if you’re addressing a middle class person in the First world. Sure, it can be invaluable to take... Read more

One by one those ubiquitous figures from my childhood are dying. The Buddha was right, all things composed of parts will come apart… Good night, Andy. Thanks for the music… Read more

In a letter to Edward Carrington in 1787, Thomas Jefferson wrote “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the later. But I mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.” I... Read more

A FEW WORDS IN FAVOR OF IDLENESS A Meditation on the Holy Land & How to Find It James Ishmael Ford 23 September 2012 First Unitarian Church Providence, Rhode Island Text Hui Tzu said to Chuang, “I have a big tree, the kind they call a “stinktree.” The trunk is so distorted, so full of knots, no one can get a straight plank out of it. The branches are so crooked you cannot cut them up in any way that... Read more

Yikes! Almost missed it… Read more

This morning I linked to Facebook a Politico story titled “Why Barack Obama is winning.” I titled my link ‘I think the point spread is too narrow to say, as the title does, ‘is winning,’ but certainly ‘might well win…'” A friend offered a link suggesting a more reliable source for those interested in the horse race would be Nate Silver’s amazing FiveThirtyEight blog. Silver is a statistician who cut his teeth creating a program to forecast the performance of... Read more

Ode To Tomatoes Pablo Neruda The street filled with tomatoes, midday, summer, light is halved like a tomato, its juice runs through the streets. In December, unabated, the tomato invades the kitchen, it enters at lunchtime, takes its ease on countertops, among glasses, butter dishes, blue saltcellars. It sheds its own light, benign majesty. Unfortunately, we must murder it: the knife sinks into living flesh, red viscera a cool sun, profound, inexhaustible, populates the salads of Chile, happily, it is... Read more

YOU ARE WHAT YOU DO, AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT A Rosh Hashanah Meditation James Ishmael Ford 16 September 2012 First Unitarian Church Providence, Rhode Island Text Now is the time for turning. The leaves are beginning to turn from green to red and orange. The birds are beginning to turn and are heading once more toward the South. The animals are beginning to turn to storing their food for the winter. For leaves, birds, and animals turning... Read more

I’m always happy when old news in the religious studies world makes it to the secular press. Today the Huff Post rather breathlessly notes the history of the Dunhaung discovery of the oldest printed book, a copy of the Diamond Sutra, a text important to the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and Zen in particular. Joyce Morgan who co-wrote “Journeys on the Silk Road: A Desert Explorer, Buddha’s Secret Library, and the Unearthing of the World’s Oldest Printed Book,” writes in summary... Read more