Malcolm X was assassinated on this day, the 21st of February in 1965. I consider him one of the signal figures in the spiritual history of the United States. I’ve written here about him before. Although it’s been. while. Malcolm Little was born in Omaha, Nebraska on May 19th, 1925. He was the fourth of seven children. His father was a Baptist preacher and an outspoken advocate of Black self-reliance. From Omaha the family moved first to Milwaukee... Read more

    THUNDER AND LIGHTNING Frederick Douglass’ Liberation Theology James Ishmael Ford A sermon delivered at the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles February 20th, 2022 “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral... Read more

Emptiness is Suchness Masao Abe First published in the Eastern Buddhist & later reprinted in the anthology of Kyoto School reflections, the Buddha Eye, as well as elsewhere. There are reasons for its popularity. What makes this essay so important to me is how it expresses the fullness of the evolution of Buddhist thinking about emptiness, here traveling through the first uses attributed to the Buddha in the Nikayas, to the Prajanaparamitia literature, to the disruptive assertions of Nagarjuna, to the Madhyamika and... Read more

      Yesterday my friend Stephen Slottow sent me a social media posting by Tony Head. I loved it. And I wrote to Tony asking for permission to repost it on my blog. He said yes, but also pointed out all he did was put the three pieces together, and he was sure others had done so before. The prefatory remark is Tony’s. A famous Zen koan about a Zen master killing a cat inspired Gary Snyder to write... Read more

    In my view there are two great American original religions. One is the Church of Jesus Christ of Later-Day Saints, perhaps better known as the Mormons. The other is New Thought. While people who write about New Thought give it a hundred mothers and fathers, I think we can actually start with Phineas Quimby. While there are others that came before, the way he put it together seems to earn him the title as a critical founding parent.... Read more

      As I age I sometimes find myself caught by the terrible beauty of our lives. How sweet it is to be alive. And how awful life can be The Japanese have a phrase, mysterious karma, for how things come to be. Karma has a mechanistic quality in our common English usage, you get what you pay for sort of thing. But, actually its a mysterious thing, and rarely can be counted in a one to one sort... Read more

    I awoke this morning thinking that line: You are not it, but in truth it is you. My dream mind captured a line within the Jewel Mirror Samadhi (Chinese: 寶鏡三昧歌; pinyin: Bǎojìng sānmèi gē; Wade-Giles: Pao-ching San-mei-ke; Japanese: Hōkyō Zammai) The poem is commonly attributed to Dongshan Liangjie, a 9th century Chan master and founder of the Caodong (Soto in Japanese) school. Dongshan is also credited with the poetic map of awakening’s faces, the Five Ranks. The Jewel Mirror is commonly chanted in contemporary Japanese Soto temples and... Read more

      The Anglican liturgical calendar marks out today, the 11th of February as a feast for the seventh century poet Caedmon. Poets are, after all the bards of the spirit. And many deserve to be celebrated as saints. And, here we get one… Caedmon is the earliest English poet that we can name. He was a monk in the monastery of the even more remarkable abbess Hilda of Whitby. The story has it that he was a lay... Read more