I was watching a presentation by Joan Chittister recently as part of the Spiritual Directors International annual conference. In it, Sister Joan put forth the Benedictine steps to humility as a solution to what she - correctly, I believe - sees as the loss of values in our overly individualistic society. One of the qualities…
It's really just that simple. If you are wondering how or why that can be, it is because ignoring truth or teaching things contrary to truth is lying, and lying is a sin. To compound the sin, persecuting people or groups of people is always sinful. Also sinful are prejudice and spreading rumors about others.…
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…
The truth is that the divisions we create between Spiritual and political perspectives are most often a way to pump up our own egos and little more. We imagine there is some qualitative difference between a Buddhist and a Christian and theologians on both sides make a very tidy living perpetuating that misperception, but mystics…
My wife had a sister from another mister who passed more than ten years ago now. When we went shopping with Helen, we would joke about "good, better, best," a marketing technique popular at the time that tried to categorize products by quality - and ultimately by price. It pained Helen to buy "good," and…
Americans are fascinate with things we perceive to be exotic. I became acutely aware of this truth when I became an Episcopalian and was suddenly exposed to people who had never left the United States but had somehow acquired a British accent. Another example is that people just love to take their shoes off at…
Craig Bergland 