SECOND THURSDAYS WITH JAMES at the First Unitarian Church of Los Angeles   October through June, 2021, we will be exploring the religions and other related topics that have particularly caught our consulting minister Rev. James Ishmael Ford’s imagination over the years. These conversations are not meant to be comprehensive, but lightly touching some of the world’s great traditions. James will be following two principles in these conversations. He says that all religions are false. But, at the... Read more

      景教 Nestorian Christianity A Survey of materials and scholarship concerning Nestorianism / East-Syriac Christianity in China From the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism (shared here with permission of the author) Jeffrey Kotyk (I have a long fascination with the Nestorian mission to China. And the hybridization of that tradition with indigenous Chinese culture and religion. My imagination was fired particularly by the work of Martin Palmer‘s The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity. (Sadly, it... Read more

    DO YOU REMEMBER? A Buddhist Reflection Robert Aitken Ordinary memory is affected by the meditation practiced in Zen Buddhism, and perhaps in other Buddhist traditions as well. As you sit on your meditation cushions, you forget everything that ordinarily presses on your consciousness, and focus exclusively on counting your breaths, facing your koan, or on the practice of sitting in pure vacancy. After it is imprinted, the theme of your practice in the meditation hall comes up naturally... Read more

    Today, the 9th of October is celebrated in the liturgical churches of the West as the feast of Dionysius the Areopagite. He is venerated in the Eastern churches on the 3rd of the same month. In the Acts of the Apostles, the second half of the text that we know as the Gospel According to Luke, there is someone named Dionysius who is converted by Paul’s sermon at the Areopagus, a famous rock outcropping at the Acropolis in Athens.... Read more

I first ran across this story in a Patheos blog by a very conservative Protestant theologian. I googled the relevant terms and found a half dozen articles about a textbook “developed for use in Chinese schools” published by the University of Electronic Science and Technology Press. It takes an old and frankly challenging story about Jesus and sets it on its head. If you’re not familiar with the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery, it’s in John’s... Read more

  Vajrayana Buddhist scholar (and father of Ulma) Robert Thurman, and sometimes renegade Roman Catholic and now Anglican scholar and priest, Matthew Fox speak of their spiritual paths, and discuss the perils, pitfalls, and promises in cultivating peace here and now. Read more

    Thor Heyerdahl was born today, the 6th of October, in 1914. it isn’t going to be easy to convey to a current generation just how much his grand adventure could set young hearts beating in the 1950s. In 1947 he and his crew aboard the raft Kon Tiki made it to the reefs of Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands, following a one hundred and one day voyage covering some four thousand, plus miles. He had a reason for... Read more

  A ZEN MEDITATION ON THE FOUR ABODES James Ishmael Ford When it is stripped to its essentials, I find the good of the Christian religion boils down to one thing. Love. It attempts to bridge the gap between humanity and the pain of humanity and some mysterious force that calls everything together. And that force is love. When I look at Buddhism, the place where I find the closest analog is in loving-kindness. Really in the whole of the... Read more

        Most high, all powerful, all good Lord! All praise is yours, all glory, all honor, and all blessing. To you, alone, Most High, do they belong. No mortal lips are worthy to pronounce your name. Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun, who brings the day; and you give light through him. And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor! Of you, Most High, he bears the... Read more

        The Dharma Gate of Nonduality Chapter Nine of THE VIMALAKIRTI SUTRA Translated by John R McRae From the Chinese (Taisho Volume 14, Number 475) The Vimalakirti Sutra was composed in Sanskrit possibly sometime in the first century of our common era, certainly by the third century. It records the expositions of the householder Vimalakirti from his sickbed, whose insight is so deep that even Manjusri, the manifestation of profound wisdom bows to listen. It is hard... Read more