by Thomas Schenk Photo by Matt Deavenport, from Flickr I keep a book titled, The Soul of the World: A Modern Book of Hours, by my bedside. It is a book of photographs and writings, compiled by Phil Cousineau with photographs by Eric Lawton. I read from this book, sometimes, when I am sleepless in the middle of the night. Actually, it is one of three books compiled and edited by Cousineau that I keep near at hand. The other two are Soul:... Read more
by Daniel Shkolnik Have you ever noticed the way a charismatic person can light up a room? Or how the air gets heavy when a difficult roommate walks in? Each of us produces what I call a “psychosocial field” that affects those around us. The New Age community made popular the language of “energies” and “vibrations,” “auras” and “vortexes.” I believe what they—and previous eras of magical thinkers—were picking up on were real psychosocial phenomenon that our minds usually sense... Read more
by Gregory Gronbacher If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence, we would rise rooted, like a tree. – Rainer Maria Rilke In my last article, “The Place of Nature in Naturalist Spirituality – Part I,” I began exploring how nature provides much of the narrative and practical contexts for many spiritual naturalists. As naturalism has become increasingly influential, explicitly and implicitly, in the culture, many are leaving supernatural forms of religion behind because they no longer make sense and are simply untrue. For... Read more
by Thomas Schenk In his book, Dear Colleague, geographer and cultural polymath Yi-Fu Tuan writes: Culture, to the extent that it is quaintness and superstition, has rationality as its enemy. Let me illustrate with the emperor T’ai-tsung. An enlightened man, he found many of the beliefs and practices of his time tiresome. One day in the ninth month of the year 628, it happened that some albino magpies built nests in linked pairs on the palace grounds. Officials, believing this association of... Read more
by James Jarrett “All of humanity’s problems stem from [a hu]man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” – Blaise Pascal. While it is more important to actually meditate than to write about it, it is also important to meditate as you can, not as you can’t. Of the many types and styles of traditional meditation, I like zazen the best. But I am not really that Zen. I’m very much not Japanese. And while I admire the story and... Read more
by Dennis Oliver “I’m prone to mystical experiences. I’ve had six that were sufficiently intense that I ended up recording them in detail later. And none of those mystical experiences involved any revelation of God. So they weren’t religious experiences – they were irreligious, and I’m still an atheist.“ Not my words, but Eric Steinhart’s, from his article in the SNS Newsletter (January 25, 2018), an exploration of “Mysticism and Beauty”. I fully identify with Eric’s experience, yet find it almost as hard... Read more
by Jeff Worthy One of my favorite quotes comes from Andre Gide: “Trust those who seek the truth, but doubt those who say they have found it.” This statement resonates so deeply with me, as I feel that I am engaged in the quest for truth every day of my life, always being willing to yield my current set of beliefs and understandings about the world when sufficiently convincing evidence or arguments come along to make me change my mind. ... Read more
by Thomas Schenk I have long been intrigued by the saying: “God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” The precise origin of this statement is unknown. It has been attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the supposed author of the Corpus Hermeticum, though its earliest appearance in the form given above seems to be in a medieval book of unknown authorship titled The Book of Twenty-Four Philosophers. There are many things I like about this statement. One is... Read more
by Thomas Schenk The relationship of mind to body has been a long and interesting topic of discussion in our culture. The positions range from the complete separation of the two, dualism, to the complete reduction of one into the other: materialism and idealism. Recently, while listening to an old jazz classic, Coleman Hawkins’ Body and Soul, I had a little insight into this problem. I have owned Hawkins’ recording on vinyl, on a CD and now as an mp3. To my... Read more
by DT Strain Spiritual Naturalism is easier to get a grip on when you think about the phrase itself. Any time there is a naturalist worldview (without supernatural beliefs) and there is any kind of spirituality, contemplative practice, or ritual – that is Spiritual Naturalism. As such, that makes it a pretty big tent. It includes, for example, Humanistic or Cultural Judaism. It includes Religious Humanism (which is religious in the sense of structure and practice, but as naturalistic as Secular... Read more
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