In response to my brief and fragmentary rumination on souls, an old and dear friend wrote me a note which included a spelling correction for detritus… She then went on to write: I recall Robert Thurman debunking the idea of reincarnation as wish fulfillment. He said, “What if ‘no reincarnation’ is actually the wish fulfillment?” He was pointing out the Western idea that we can eventually escape the consequences of our actions, and if all else fails, you just die... Read more

Can’t use it, but also, didn’t really want to just throw it away. So… Back when I was smarter, maybe that was last week, I liked to tell people that the real problem in religion isn’t whether we believe in a God that acts in the world or not, but whether we believe we have a separate soul or not. I, I’m embarrassed to say, am inclined from that preface to go into a rant about the problems with the... Read more

On this day in 301 (that’s right, three digits) what would come to be called the Most Serene Republic of San Marino was founded by a stonemason and later saint, Saint Marinus (whose feast day is to my mind quite appropriately celebrated on this day rather than on the more traditional date of his death). Founded as a republic, this microstate completely surrounded by Italy is the oldest continuous republic in the world… Pretty cool… Read more

Wikipedia tells us that on this day in 1838, “(d)ressed in a sailor’s uniform and carrying identification papers provided by a Free Black seaman, future abolitionist Frederick Douglass boards a train in Maryland on his way to freedom from slavery.” One of the great American heroes… Read more

There is a tiny but growing oeuvre of Buddhist themed film available here in the West. Right off the top I think of Hollywood blockbusters like Seven Years in Tibet, Kundun and Little Buddha (my favorite of these, but for which at this moment I cannot find a trailer…). It is interesting these big flicks illustrate Tibetan Buddhist themes, particularly the idea of rebirth which in the Tibetan telling and the Hollywood interpretations looks a lot like reincarnation, a controversial... Read more

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The other day I found my father’s VFW cap. It carries the ribbons from his war years. Among them is a Purple Heart with two oak leaf clusters. I know lots about how he got them. Among other things I spent my childhood watching the shrapnel working its way out of various parts of his body… Now his life wasn’t much before the war. And he threw most of the rest of his life away following the war, and in... Read more

Thank you, Tony, for the pointer… Read more

Not long ago I was sitting in a local Providence coffee shop with a ministerial colleague discussing strategy in support of marriage equality. Rhode Island is the last New England state to not allow same gender marriage and I am part of a group of progressive clergy committed to changing that. My colleague, a liberal Protestant minister, alluded to how as late as the early nineteen seventies in American law a man and a woman who married were a “single... Read more

I’m not sure where the term first settled into my consciousness as something wrong, but perhaps it was early on in my ministry when I’d meet with young couples preparing to marry. Rather than use more or less traditional “’till death do us part” language to express their level of commitment, they’d a little too frequently ask for euphemisms such as “for as long as love lasts” or, and this is what I’m thinking about, a promise to give the... Read more