While I think today’s decision by California’s Supreme Court upholding Proposition 8 was more than unfortunate, I am heartened by the fact they did not invalidate the more than eighteen thousand marriages already performed. I’m also glad faculty and staff from my old seminary joined with other religious leaders in the protests that followed and should have followed. Our Unitarian Universalist president Dr William Sinkford issued this statement. “I am deeply troubled that the discrimination Proposition 8 introduced into the... Read more

       Draft   BOUNDLESS WAY ZEN   A BIBLIOGRAPHY FOR ZEN STUDENTS   Two points. This bibliography isn’t meant to be exhaustive. Nor, that every book on this list needs to be read by a serious Zen student. Still, that serious student, particularly anyone pursuing ordination as a Zen priest within the Boundless Way, will find these books an important beginning to the intellectual side of Zen study. Also, one more point: this is very much a work... Read more

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) The clip is from RWE.org, a site devoted to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Worth a visit… Thank you, Boston Unitarian, for the reminder! Read more

For several years following my sojourn as a Zen Buddhist monk and before I found a happy home blending Zen Buddhism and Unitarian Universalism, while I was still trying to find my way I fell in with what for a lack of a better term I’ve called ecclesiastical gnostics as a subset of something larger often called “Independent Catholicism.” The far better term coined in recent years by the scholar participant John Plummer is “the Independent Sacramental” movement, particularly in... Read more

I’m preparing a talk on the development of the Boundless Way Zen project for our upcoming annual mahasangha meeting on the 6th of June. I was working up a list of dates that could be seen as significant markers, or beginning points for Zen in the West. There are a number of them. That’s when I noticed that yesterday, fifty years ago, Shunryu Suzuki arrived in the United States to assume the position of resident priest at Sokoji temple which... Read more

thank you, Uku, for the pointer! Read more

Robert Zimmerman was born on this day in 1941. He provided an essential part of the background of my lurch into adulthood. Read more

On this day in 1929 Mickey Mouse spoke for the first time… Read more

Don’t forget this is World Turtle Day! Read more

Mary Cassatt was born on this day in 1844. As the Wikipedia article states, while a prominent Impressionist, “Cassatt’s popular reputation is based on an extensive series of rigorously drawn, tenderly observed, yet largely unsentimental paintings and prints on the theme of the mother and child.” Born to a well to do family, she traveled to France to learn from the acknowledged masters of the day. However she had to learn in the face of rampant and institutionalised sexism. Fortunately... Read more