Category: Philosophy
Spills: A Collage for the News
When we receive news, we are being invited into a transaction of words, but we are not told what to do with them. We respond.... When words respond to words, we call it “education” and “dialogue... Read More
Where is God in Goodbye?
A while back I found out that my partner was a sex addict who had been leading a boozy secret life full of violence fetishes, endangerment of women, unprotected sex, compulsive pornographic email exch... Read More
Making Sense of Tragedy: Was the Earthquake a “Divine Punishment”?
Over at Religion Dispatches Levi McLaughlin, a professor of religion who specializes in East Asian traditions, writes about Tokyo’s governor Shintaro Ishihara describing the tsunami that struck... Read More
Give Meaning to What is Positive, Not to What is Negative
I can say with complete honesty that I am not mean. In fact, I haven’t a mean bone in my body. So, why then, do I sometimes do mean things? Why do I sometimes surround myself with negative thoughts ... Read More
Sue Blackmore Decides That Religions Are Not, in Fact, Viruses of the Mind
Sue Blackmore is one of the go-to voices in the UK on matters of religious thinking and consciousness. She is, believe it or not, an atheist with a PhD in parapsychology. Originally a firm believer ... Read More
Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Tibetan Buddhist Mandala
I spent a lot of time at the Gyuto Monks’ mandala at the 2009 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia. The mandala is the traditional Tibetan Buddhist form of sandpainting, pra... Read More
You Probably Do Not Have Narcissistic Personality Disorder
I was an undergraduate when I started hearing my classmates speak in reverent tones about Buddhism. Suddenly everyone was reading Hesse’s Siddhartha and setting their watch timers for twenty minutes... Read More
What Are We Saying?
For me, this raises important questions about the power and significance of words. The words of prayer are so important that I don’t want to change them, yet they are often so problematic for me tha... Read More