I bow to the pencil, the pencil maker, the tree that gave its wood, the graphite that fills its core, and the mind that conceived pencil. I bow to all the teeth and jaws that have chewed pencils out of boredom or nervousness.
Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed.
Featuring Philip Berrigan, Genie Zeiger, Daniel Berrigan, and more.
There was once a Jew who had been wandering for hundreds of years in search of his death.
Suddenly A thousand seagulls rise off the river behind my classroom. Facing the back windows, I watch the birds fly
A low-grade, persistent terror plagued me throughout the summer before sixth grade, because in June I’d found out I was to spend the next year in Rabbi Friedberg’s class at my Orthodox Jewish Hebrew school.
Rabbi Rachel Timoner On Rediscovering Judaism
Our God is the God of the widow and the orphan and the stranger, a God who says, “If you harm them, their cries will reach me.”
One does not sit in order to become enlightened. One sits because, as the Buddha exclaimed at the moment of his awakening, one is enlightened as one is. The practice is simply a means of realizing this fact, which the ordinary, dualistic mind obscures.
Norman Fischer On The Tyranny Of The Self
We are paradoxical. We are beings who are limited and who will always create a world of suffering, and we’re beings who have the capacity to understand that and, in some way, go beyond it.
