It’s YOUR New Year! Some Simple Suggestions for 2018
It’s YOUR New Year. Maybe you can’t change a whole lot in your life or your self. Maybe you don’t...
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Category: Prayer & Meditation
Let Nothing Upset You; Let Nothing Frighten You; Even Now. (Teresa of Avila)
An Exercise in Calm This image - a sledge, hammering against "FEAR" - seems the opposite of...
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4 Short Thoughts on Thanksgiving
Here are links to 4 short articles related to Thanksgiving, with very brief summaries. 3 Short...
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3 Short Lists for Making Thanksgiving Work
A. Reasons We DON’T LIKE to Hear About It. We’re having a rough day. We’re...
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Spiritual Tune-up: Sincerity in PRAYER
Hypocrisy or insincerity is the first thing to guard against in prayer. Beware not to say what...
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Spiritual Tune-up: It Takes SILENCE
God is the friend of silence … We need silence to be able to touch souls. – Mother...
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Spiritual Tune-up: DO What Others Won’t
“Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can do what others...
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Give Thanks Freely – but Not for EVERYthing!
It’s (almost) THANKSGIVING We appreciate food, and housing, clothes, and transportation. We prize...
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The Quiet Places in Our Lives Make Our Public Activity Safer
Contemplation and Public Action The public good is most in danger when the voluntary visits to...
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You Can Pray and Still Be Wrong
Here’s William Jennings Bryan, about 100 years ago. He’s rejecting the idea that...
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Young People Changing the World: Activism and Prayer – “Occupy Spirituality” by Bucko & Fox
I am very pleased with this book (“Occupy Spirituality“). It is a conversation...
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John Paul II: Private Prayer and the Dangers of Public Life
For decades he resisted Nazi, then Communist, oppression. How did he cope? Connie and I recently...
Read MoreEmail – She Is Eager to Scare Us All!
Scary Email I received an anonymous forwarded email the other day that combined a bit of good spiritual advice with a lot of classic Republico-Christian fear-mongering. Actually, it wasn’t totally anonymous. It was signed...
Read MoreHow Goes Your Pilgrimage? – Parker Palmer, a Quaker View
Sometimes the pilgrimage does not go so well. Sometimes we wonder if we’re still moving forward at all. In the tradition of pilgrimage, … hardships are seen not as accidental but as integral to the journey itself....
Read MoreSpiritual Refreshment – A Musical Bath for Our Souls
A man saw the whole world as a grinning skull and crossbones. The rose flesh of life shriveled from all faces. Nothing counts. Everything is a fake. Dust to dust and ashes to ashes and then an old darkness and a useless silence....
Read MoreThe Soul of Prayer – Peter Taylor Forsyth on Spiritual Genuis
“Prayer changes things.” It puts us into direct contact with God, and thus brings God into more active contact with our personal lives and surroundings. That more intimate, active presence of God does indeed tend to...
Read MoreDoes Prayer “Work”? “Scientific & Pastoral Perspectives…”
Here’s a review of another book on prayer as promised a couple of days ago. [Here’s a more recent review of a book on prayer – P T Forsyth’s Soul of Prayer] My second acquisition at Pastors’ Seminar...
Read MoreYou Can Pray And Still Be Very Wrong
Here’s William Jennings Bryan, about 100 years ago. He’s rejecting the idea that because a man is rich, powerful, and a faithful churchgoer his behavior should be automatically honored and imitated. It is not...
Read MoreAs We Think, So We Are
I recommend for your attention this excellent recent comment by bookaholic. Here are some excerpts. This little bit about Jesus: “he was not energized by and focused on his enemies” is some kind of key. I spent...
Read MoreA Prayer About Intimacy, Beauty, and Spiritual Reality
Jesus’ prayer in John 17 is unusual – for it’s length and for its “flavor.” It is relatively long. Actually, it’s short by the standards of some preachers, but it’s long by New Testament...
Read MoreThink Thanks on Thanksgiving
Just a reminder – The English word “thank” developed itself out of the older word “think.” So as we think about thanks this week, let’s be sure we really do think. I don’t know how you...
Read MorePrayer: An Excercise in Reality Therapy
It can be difficult to pray when you get into thinking that you have to “perform” prayer at a certain level of quality in order for it to be valid. Prayer is rather the one place where we are least under obligation...
Read More“Thoroughness and Charm”
Here’s another of my favorite prayers – this one from St. Thomas Aquinas. A great philosopher and university professor of the 13th century, he had an unusual philosophical method – when stumped he would...
Read MorePresident Harry Truman’s Integrity Prayer
I found this in David McCullough’s 1992 biography Truman several years ago and put it into a little prayer book I made for myself. Of Truman’s high school years McCullough writes, “He memorized a prayer, one he...
Read MoreReal Prayer in the Real World
Here are some good thoughts on prayer from a curriculum ad I got from the Baptist Center for Ethics. Many people seem to understand prayer as little more than a visit with a Santa Claus-type figure who can grant our every wish....
Read MoreEgotism in Prayer
Does anybody see, in any way, any truth in this? Any personal experience with this distinction in your own life (or elsewhere)? There is a certain egoist self-confidence which is increased by the more elementary forms of...
Read MoreJesus on “Some Who Were Confident of Their Own Righteousness.” Not pretty.
To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. “The Pharisee...
Read MoreDaily “Sabbath”: an Ignatian-Style Meditation & Prayer Site
Here’s a valuable site: sacredspace.ie. It provides daily guides for brief meditation and prayer. I’m not Catholic in background, practice, or inclination; but I have gotten major benefit from studying certain...
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Thanksgiving in Daniel’s Prayer Life
According to the Biblical account the ancient prophet Daniel was a very highly placed governmental...
Read MoreThanksgiving – Think
Here are 4 paragraphs from an article I wrote on Thanksgiving for Southwest Nebraska News a few years ago. Our word “thank” developed from an even more common good old five-letter word – think. Thank comes from...
Read MoreLearning Jesus
May 11, 2004 I just finished teaching a community college course on “The Life and Teachings of Jesus.” I was impressed to see that people actually changed during the semester. We just discussed what we read in the...
Read MoreShould We Legislate Christianity?
May 8, 2004 The easy way to “win” the “lost” is to make Christianity into an ideology and force it on people by the power of the state. Shall we get on with it? Or if not that, we could make a simplified...
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