Church historian and author Diana Butler Bass suggests that the questions people ask of religion have historically been "what?" questions. What should I believe? What do I need to know? These are questions religion is uniquely situated to answer. They are the questions of my patents' generation, a generation born before, during, and shortly after…
While it is a bit of an oversimplification, there are essentially two perspectives within institutional Christianity. One says that belief is a matter of memorizing facts, scripture, and doctrine. Success in this view is like passing a final exam. Entering through the gates of heaven in this view involves taking a test on an IPad.…
Wait just a minute - some of you are either lying, overestimating yourselves, or both. I suppose it can't be avoided. Read on. If, at the end of this article you decide what I wrote was nonsense then all I can say is, "I told you so." I have been knocking around the spiritual world…
Oh yes, everyone is wounded. Me too. I understand. You have all been broken and it's terribly unfair. Of course we all haven't been wounded in the same degree or in the same way, nevertheless we are wounded. Someone or several someones have damaged us unfairly. It never should have happened. Can we stipulate to…
...unless you are willing to admit our flaws. Americans are a horribly inconsistent bunch. We expect things we have no reason to expect, for which there is no evidence of even te possibility of manifestation, but not only do we expect them we also become enraged when we don't get them. Some of that is…
Do Americans even know what they want any longer? Most of the knee jerk answers people offer when asked what they really want seem to offer up something that, realistically, they aren't ever going to have. Some say they want to be wealthy, but that's a profoundly subjective goal. Others want to be happy, but…
I haven't written in a while because I have been thinking about the current world situation. From a spiritual perspective, we seem to be in a period of moral bankruptcy stemming from all moral questions being profoundly oversimplified. The cause of that reductionism is neither on the left or the right alone. Rather, it's everywhere.…
I am coming to believe that, in nondual thought, there are advanced basic truths. If you feel some resistance to that statement, it may be because you don't feel that "advanced" and "basic" can exist together in the same space. We have been trained to believe in an either/or universe, but in reality we live…
Allow me to begin by saying that I have never been a fan of Jon Gruden. I have found him a bombastic ego maniac with the equivalent of a comb over who speaks like a huckster used car salesman. What anyone sees in him is beyond me. Even his coaching successes have largely come on…
I lived in Indianapolis, or as I sometimes call it, "Indiana no place," in the very late 1980s and very early 1990s. For reasons that aren't germane to this post, I had a second job working at a pizza place. The pizza place was located next door to a beauty parlor in a small strip…
Craig Bergland 