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…
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…
There are a number of spiritual practices across traditions that are still based in a pre-scientific worldview. Consider fasting. Fasting was thought to clear our minds so we could hear from God. If we fasted long enough we would see things and hear things that we otherwise wouldn't. Fasting is rooted in the Greek belief…
Many may be tempted to see the fall of Jerry Falwell, Jr. to be a tragic, isolated incident of one man gone astray. It's anything but. This isn't about Jerry sitting in the corner 'observing" while the pool boy cum business partner frolics on the bed with Jerry's wife. (As an aside, since these religious…
Attachment to outcomes is never a good idea, yet in our culture we receive messages from all sides telling us we are absolutely, personally responsible for the success of every movement that we support. The messages quite often are formatted in an "if, then" way. "If our effort doesn't succeed, then disaster looms and so…
At one point in my life, I was very concerned with how things work. I very much wanted explanations for things both knowable and unknowable. I didn't so much care about why they worked, that was a question that I found much less interesting and at times frankly irritating. Why something works doesn't really tell…
It used to be called "inclusive language," now more and more it's being called "genderless language." If genderless language is anything like inclusive language, it will fast become an idol. Allow me to explain... My first church valued inclusive language to the point where if something wasn't written that way - even things written long…
In each of us there is an essence that is real. The rest is just an accumulation of life over time that has been caked on top of the real, what some have called the true self. All religious traditions have found their own way of saying that life is about returning to that essence…
I was listening to a podcast the other day, and one of the hosts is a woman working toward a PhD in women's studies. She's a white woman, though that really doesn't matter. If you have a PhD it doesn't matter if you are white, black, brown, yellow, green, or orange (though if you are…
I confess that, watching the political discourse over the last few years I have become increasingly discouraged. I have watched American politics, not as an obsession but as a citizen interested in public discourse, since the late Johnson administration. To my more smart assed younger friends, I should specify that I mean the Lyndon, and…
Craig Bergland 