Fundamentalism

Uniforms

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 -0400

For a job at Burger King, a prison in North Carolina, a girls’ school in Iran

The Apostate Of Orange Street

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

I was dressed and ready for church, waiting while the others bustled about in preparation, when a sudden conviction took hold of me: “I’m not going,” I told my mother.

Chance

Tue, 01 May 2018 00:00:00 -0400

They talked about it while soaking in an unusually deep / red tub at his rented house. How the constellations / had gone out of their way to align, so that their paths / converged for a time in the redwoods, in a shingled / cottage above the creek.

Leaving The Faith

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

“You can’t have freedom of religion without free speech. You have to protect all of it: the Bible and the Quran and my right to say, ‘These books are full of fairy tales.’ ”

Faith

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400

A kidney donor, Las Vegas, a ballet dancer

Moral Combat

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500

You can spend your whole life struggling against war and end up with a world that’s more violent than when you began, but resistance is what gives you spiritual strength. You trust that the work is worth doing and that it’s helping somewhere, though perhaps evidence of that won’t be apparent in your lifetime. You find self-worth in the ability to stand up and fight back without worrying too much about what you can accomplish. That is part of being human. We’re not God. We have a limited capacity to fight evil. We use the gifts and tools we’ve been given and trust that life is meaningful, even if everything we try to do seems to fail.

The Two Worlds

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400

Walking into the temple compound, we walked into another world: quiet, serene, holy. Irregular stepping stones led us through a mossy garden to a steadily dripping little waterfall. Off to one side was a standing figure of Kwan Yin, bodhisattva of compassion, standing on a lotus pedestal.

The Ultimate Kindness

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 00:00:00 -0400

War and peace start in the hearts of individuals. Strangely enough, even though all beings would like to live in peace, our method for obtaining peace over the generations seems not to be very effective: we seek peace and happiness by going to war. This can occur at the level of our domestic situation, in our relationships with those close to us.

Stupid Design

Mon, 01 May 2006 00:00:00 -0400

Fundamentalist Christians are leading a movement to teach “intelligent design” in our public schools, as an alternative to evolution.

In God’s Name

Sat, 01 Apr 2006 00:00:00 -0500

In the past Muslims understood that the message of Islam is contained in very specific teachings, and that other teachings in the Koran are very Arabian in character. Unfortunately, some present-day Muslims — and they are properly called “fundamentalists” — do not look at the historical context of the Koran’s teachings, and so they want to transplant those Arabian teachings exactly as they are into twenty-first-century society.

Sitting In The Fire

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

The first noble truth of the Buddha is that people experience dukka, a feeling of dissatisfaction or suffering, a feeling that something is wrong. . . . only in the West is this dissatisfaction articulated as “Something is wrong with me.”

No Such Thing As A True Story

Sat, 01 Jan 2005 00:00:00 -0500

In Taoism there’s a famous saying that goes, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao.” Another way you could say that, although I’ve never seen it translated this way, is “As soon as you begin to believe in something, you can no longer see anything else.”

Called To Be Apart

Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:00:00 -0500

My mother believed in miracles. She believed that faith could move mountains, that there is a divine plan for the universe, that Jesus never fails. My mother believed that if she was the best little girl in the world, nothing bad would ever happen to her.

How To Prosper During The Coming Bad Years

Fri, 01 Feb 2002 05:00:00 -0500

In the summer of 1979, I fell ruinously in love with a coltish, athletically robust Greek girl of fifteen named Nicole Liarkos . When I think of her now (which isn’t very often), I always imagine her poolside, her creamy caramel skin twice bisected by the triple triangles of her buttercup yellow bikini, her left arm blocking the sun from her eyes.

Hell

Fri, 01 Feb 2002 04:00:00 -0500

Ten minutes into a recent flight from San Jose to St. Louis, I was reveling in a first-class upgrade and a new Margaret Atwood novel when I felt and heard a powerful thump. The aircraft, which had been gaining altitude, rocked vigorously.

Excerpts From Path Without Destination

Sun, 01 Aug 1999 00:00:00 -0400

Possessions are signs of status, success, position, and power. It’s no wonder that our modern society has been called the consumer society. Unlimited economic growth has become the ideal of every nation in the world. In order to achieve such growth, we have destroyed lives, families, the social fabric, and our relationship with the natural world. We have passed the point of increasing human well-being by increasing material wealth.

In Defense Of Original Sin

Thu, 01 Jan 1998 00:05:00 -0500

Schooling was to be about the creation of loyalty to a principle of abstract central authority, and no serious rival — whether parents, tribe, tradition, self, or God — would be welcome in school. Corporate economics and the developing modern culture eliminated the other rivals, but it took the highest court in the land to bar God.

Encounter Above Tintern Abbey

Mon, 01 Jun 1992 00:00:00 -0400

Then he let go of me, and the meaning of the poem was clear. This man had finally brought me inside of it. Both of us had somehow been given what we came for. On the trail down to the bridge I broke out in goose flesh.

Drowning

Wed, 01 Apr 1992 00:10:00 -0500

At the age of two, I saw the ocean for the first time. I threw wide my short arms and ran shouting, straight into the Pacific, where an undertow reached out to embrace me. I still remember the upside-down whirlpool of warmth, like the womb out of which I’d so recently swum.

Renegade Priest

Thu, 01 Aug 1991 00:00:00 -0400

We have to get back to that sense of raw reverence. And by reverence I don’t mean this bourgeois thing of nodding your head and being pious. Reverence comes from the word to revere, which means to stand in awe. The Bible has been mistranslated; where we read that wisdom begins with fear of the Lord, it should read awe. Awe is the beginning of wisdom.

The Moon

Sun, 01 Jul 1984 00:00:00 -0400

Seeing the moon from the desert, from the Ile de la Cite in Paris, from a starry camping night

Judaism’s Mystical Heart

Fri, 01 Jun 1984 00:00:00 -0400

The unity that Judaism is looking for is the point at which, without losing this brain, a corridor of correspondence is opened between this brain — the individual identity — and the transcendent identity. But it isn’t that I become annihilated and flow into the great river; it’s that I am maintained in a scale model relationship to the transcendent. I stay here, but I grow outward. I stay here, but I use my here only to be positioned onto there.