Brother Wayne Teasdale, author of The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions and A Monk in the World: Cultivating a Spiritual Life, coined the new word “interspirituality.” Sort of a mash-up between “interfaith dialogue” and “spirituality,” interspirituality refers to the possibility or practice of integrating...
Where Do You Draw the Line: Discerning Appropriate Boundaries for Interspiritual Practice
I recently received a letter from a reader of this blog who grew up an evangelical Baptist, and when to a conservative Christian school, the kind of place where if you doubted that God created the world in seven days, people were worried for the state of your eternal soul. As an adult, he discovered Christian mysticism and writers like Richard Rohr (and yours truly), and opened up a new dimension...
Remaining at the Cross: On Being a Contemplative Christian in a Church That Has Forgotten Its Mystical Heritage
This is turning out to be “James Ishmael Ford” week at my blog. Earlier this week I posted a review of his new book, Introduction to Zen Koans. Check it out if you haven’t done so already. One of the reasons I like his writing so much is that he is…... Read more at Patheos
“You Wrote Books About Paganism?!?”
The late Kenneth Leech used to tell the story about giving a lecture at a seminary in America on the topic of race relations, and afterwards a seminarian seemed surprised to learn that he was the “same Kenneth Leech” who wrote books on spirituality. Apparently, the mind of this seminarian couldn’t equate a social-justice Christian with a contemplative-prayer Christian. But yes...
The Mystical Body
How do we embody the contemplative life? And how does the contemplative life make a difference in our bodies (both as individuals and collectively)? Fran and I had dinner the other night with a charming couple named Ray and Lee. We had met Ray a few weeks earlier when I spoke at a UU Church here in Atlanta; like so many spiritual seekers of our time, Ray has been a wanderer, setting forth from...
Interfaith Dialogue, Interspirituality, and Holy Daring
Recently I spoke at a church located about an hour north of where I live. As I drove to the church, I chatted on the phone with my brother who lives in Florida. We were making plans for me to come visit him on the weekend of our birthdays (his is a day later than mine). I mentioned that while I was there, I wanted to attend a training weekend at the local Shambhala Center. My brother, who is a...
A List of Books for Buddhist-Christian Dialogue
Are you interested in exploring the richness of dialogue and interspiritual practice between Christianity and Buddhism? If so, then here’s enough literature to keep you going for a while. Each of the books on the following list has some sort of connection with both Christianity and Buddhism. Some of these titles are academic studies, some the writings of monastics, others geared toward the...