There is no Christian church with a more direct, intimate relationship with the life of Jesus of Nazareth than the one I was born into: the Antiochian Eastern Orthodox Christian Church. Its roots lie in the same ground that Jesus walked on, and are deeper than the written Gospels. The church, my cultural heritage, and […]
Tag: God
Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped,and the insight to know the one from the other.—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1937 Introduction In the quadrune mind model of spiritual consciousness, we state that the purpose of a Human life is to reduce suffering and increase healing, but what does that […]
Introduction To define religion and spirituality is difficult to do. Yet, it is important that we have some understanding of what these words mean for the quadrune mind model of spirituality and this blog. The best definitions of “religion” and “spirituality” for the quadrune mind model come from Bowling Green State University. Spirituality is defined as “the […]
Recently I was talking with some friends and as we are all of a certain age, the conversation came around to funeral service options. For various personal and religious reasons, several different preferences were expressed. Choices included cremation, a launch to sea on a small boat, donation to a medical school, and my offering, a […]
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Fences, Neighbors, and Zoos
My friend and colleague, Dr. Paul Lehman, writes an informative and incisive blog, America’s Race Problem. In his most recent post, “Paul R. Lehman, Our history tells us why the mob stormed the Capitol,” Paul describes the attitudes of America’s earliest “white” settlers toward the indigenous people—an attitude he links to the violent assault upon the U.S. […]
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Why Are We on Earth?
(Or, Why On Earth Are We?) Why are we on earth? I believe we are here to help extend an ancient trend from instinctive personal survival, to self-sacrifice for group survival, to seeking methods of universal survival and even well-being. The quadrune mind model is melioristic, meaning it believes the world naturally tends to get better […]
Creationists and evolutionists have a long history of animosity toward each other. Some creationists see the theory of evolution to be a direct attack on the existence of God. Some evolutionists would agree. For instance, naturalists such as Stephen Jay Gould could become apoplectic at the suggestion that evolution is a teleological process (see The […]
It looks like the world is having a nervous breakdown. It had seemed quite anxious for a while. What can the quadrune mind model of spirituality have to say about that? Does it matter if we continue our quest for spiritual awakening in such dismal times? Don’t we have enough to do just to survive? […]