Share We get up in the morning, eat breakfast, go to work or school, and come home again. Most likely sometime during the day we will also be disappointed about something. "The main emotion of the adult American who has had all the advantages of wealth, education, and culture is disappointment," novelist John Cheever once wrote. We'd add that this feeling is common no matter where you live. Things don't always turn out the way we want them to. Disappointment is part of the fabric of life. Spiritual practices help us discern what disappointments...

Share Author Daneen Akers starts this book with one of her favorite scriptures, Job 33:4. The translation she uses — from scholar, professor, and priest Wil Gafney — restores the original feminine grammar of the verse: The Spirit of God, She has made me,and the breath of the Nursing God,She gives me life. Moved by this image of a nourishing, breath-giving Mama God, Akers offers children a profoundly reassuring and encouraging view of the world. It's a view which evokes gratitude. From the vast — "Thank you for the earth and all living things" —...

Share “Enhancing our perspectives on others and ourselves can improve how we speak to each other about the world and how we express our disagreements and moral and ethical similarities. The key here isn’t a 'I must win' posture toward conversation, but rather a 'I should learn' approach to exchange. It’s an opportunity to clarify and refine, to grow and better appreciate a diversity of perspectives and opinions. And so, why do we have these difficult conversations? Well … because we might just learn something that helps us to better understand ...

Share This book should help many people find fresh ways to navigate issues of disagreement with others. The authors demonstrate that, if two people are willing to listen and admit their assumptions, as well as what they need to learn from others, there are ways out of our polarities. Brad Braxton, a Black Christian, is president of Chicago Theological Seminary. Anthony Pinn, also Black, is a secular humanist, and a distinguished professor of humanities at Rice University. Pinn differs a great deal from Braxton on matters of faith, activism, and...

There are a lot of paradoxes in psychology—the harder you try to fall asleep, the less likely you will; the more you try to avoid thinking negative thoughts, the more likely they will pop into your head; and according to newer research, your greatest meaning in life can come from your greatest pains. As a clinical psychologist specializing in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), I’ve spent many therapy hours straddling the spaces of pain and meaning. As Steven Hayes, founder of ACT, shared with me on Your Life in Process Podcast, “You hurt ...

Share Many religious traditions encourage you to find a spiritual mentor, guru, director, or guide who might listen to your stories along the spiritual journey and help direct the way to what you seek. This book suggests, instead, that the best path is one you self-discover. The author holds a PhD in sociology from the Sorbonne in Paris and lives in Switzerland. He begins with a “Blessing for Spiritual Seekers” that includes this: “I bless all those who are on an honest spiritual quest. I bless them I their courage to break away from old moorin...

Share On awakening, bless this day, for it is already full of unseen good, which your blessings will call forth; for to bless is to acknowledge the unlimited good that is embedded in the very texture of the universe and awaiting each and all. On passing people in the street, on the bus, in places of work and play, bless them. The peace of your blessing will companion them on their way, and the aura of its gentle fragrance will be a light on their path. —Pierre Pradervand in The Gentle Art of Spiritual Discernment

Share For the past eight years, a community of people at all skill levels have been gathering at SpiritualityandPractice.com to explore contemplative photography together. Participants create photos in response to a weekly theme we provide. The atmosphere is one of acceptance, encouragement, and delight in the wonders that this artistic medium opens for us. Everyone is welcome, whether you've been in the group for years or are just discovering this opportunity today. In our article "The Spiritual Gifts of Photography" we note that those of us o...

Share Christopher Nolan has expended an enormous amount of creative energy serving as director, producer, and writer of this engrossing biopicture about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant American theoretical physicist who oversaw the secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to develop an atomic bomb. This bold, intense, inventively filmed, and well-acted thriller is based on Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In a scene in t...

Share Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant is a riveting war story about the bond that is forged between a tough American sergeant and a gifted Afghan interpreter. Their team’s mission is to find and destroy Taliban bomb manufacturers. John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) is on his fourth tour of duty when Ahmed (Dar Salim) joins his squad as an interpreter. Learning that he is a former heroin trafficker does not ease their working together. But the relationship between the men grows more trusting when Ahmed proves himself to be a highly skilled reader of Talib...

Share This heart-warming chapter book starts with Squirrel doing everything in her power — reaching from a tree, standing on tiptoe, swinging a stick, creating a very tall ladder — to pluck the moon out of the sky for Panda. Convinced that the moon is a ball, Panda wants to play with it. They still don't have a ball with which to play at the end of these intense and rather zany attempts. But Panda notes that they "have something a lot better" — a friend. The stories in this book, translated from Dutch, have much in common with friendship classi...

Share “Thoreau suggests that it is better to try to become good than to try to do good. It is not that Thoreau avoids doing good. Rather, he finds the way people take for granted what is good disturbing. “The difference is in what actions are inspired by these two aims. Thoreau’s concern is that ethical life ought not be the doing of a certain set of prescribed good deeds. Ethics is relational, the working out together of what our relationship and our world ought to be like. Someone who does good without thinking about whether he is good enforc...

Share Too often seen as a writer about nature and simple living, this book places Henry David Thoreau — still with those passions — squarely in the service of social justice. As the author makes clear, Walden Woods, to which Thoreau famously retreated for a two-year experiment in living, “were not only a place of peace. They were also where people of color and poor people we now consider white (largely Irish) lived and worked. In going to the woods, [Thoreau] opened himself to encounter with people outside his social, racial, and class position...

Share Today’s workers in all sectors of the economy are increasingly working under time pressures as they try to meet appointments and deadlines. We speak of “having” and “saving” and “wasting” time but we never quite succeed in conquering it. We claim to want more time for things that matter outside of our work but to make room for them we have to rush through eating, recreation, and pleasure. In the end, we feel exhausted and diminished. “Time is deeper and stranger than anything else in our lives. It takes everything with it, nothing is bigg...

Share At the very end of the last episode of the Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso, Keeley slides Rebecca a binder that says, “AFC Richmond Women’s Team.” This scene has started rumors of a possible spinoff. Do we dare Believe? We do. And . . . perhaps this scene points us to the more imminent pleasure that awaits us in the very real, very un-scripted FIFA Women's World Cup, which kicks off July 20 and ends August 20, 2023. The World Cup is the biggest stage for the most popular team sport in the world. Football, or soccer as it’s called in the United...

Countless mindfulness instructions emphasize not getting caught up in thoughts about the past or the future. Instead, stay in the moment! This is sound advice, of course. For one thing, if you’re chopping vegetables and obsessing about an unkind remark you made to a friend last week, you might chop into your finger instead of a carrot.  It’s also true, though, that this advice can be unhelpful if it is presented and understood too simplistically, as it often is. It can promote the idea that the present moment is a kind of dreamy state of vacuou...

Share “Whether as a Christian or secular saint, the figure of Francis has yielded an abundant harvest of artistic inspiration. There is a Francis for every historical period and tendency, for differing theologies and for different politics. And this is at the very least a testimony to the enduring fascination of the man who embraced poverty for a higher ideal and who taught that all human beings and all created things are united in a common brotherhood under a loving God. Francis continues to be a luminary for religion, for culture more broadly...

Artwork by: Artwork by: Artur Zhuk, age 13Written by: Fatima Shafi 1 By the glorious morning light; 2 and by the night when it darkens, 3 your Lord has not forsaken you, nor is He displeased with you, 4 and the Hereafter will indeed be better for you than the present life; 5 soon you will be gratified with what your Lord will give you. 1-5: Surah Duha (The Glorious Morning Light) The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was when many of us lost or found ourselves. For me, it was a combination of both: I felt numb in my heart, marooned on an islan...

Share Very little is known about the life of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). He left behind no self-portraits, no letters, no notes, no students or apprentices. As for his art, no records have been found to clarify how he did what he did. But now some new light is being shed on his work on the occasion of the largest and most comprehensive exhibition of his work at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Suzanne Raes directs this fascinating documentary with illuminating commentary on Vermeer by the exhibition’s curators Gregor Weber and P...

Share Writer and director Paul Schrader is a serious filmmaker who has put together a trilogy of dramas about redemption, morality, violence, and transformation. In First Reformed (2018), he focuses on a Christian minister whose life and faith are turned upside down by his guilt over pressuring his son to join the military and also by a parishioner’s worries over climate change. In The Card Counter (2021), a slippery professional gambler is forced to come to terms with his past crimes at Abu Ghraib. In Master Gardener, a former neo-Nazi whose l...