Category: christianity
- The Process of GrowthNotes During a Pandemic Years ago, from my college days until way into my thirties, I was obsessed with a writer named Paul Goodman. He had been a panelist at a symposium when I was a freshman and I found his presence electrifying. All through the sixties he was a famous and extremely successful author, primarily ...Read more
- Deluded FoolZazen and Prayer Some years ago my wife and I were renting an apartment in Chapel Hill while our Durham residence underwent an extensive renovation. There were various problems with the apartment—it was small, and had a real problem with moisture in the air, so we had to run de-humidifiers all the time—and we were extremely ...Read more
- Coming Together by Being ApartIn Retreat and On Retreat My Zen teacher Josho Pat Phelan has sat with the group every weekday for years. In fact, though she does many other things—administrate the whole group, and give talks, and lead sesshins, and do dokusan—I’ve always thought of her her primary job as waking up every morning before the crack of ...Read more
- What Makes a Religion?The Circle of the Way: A Concise History of Zen from the Buddha to the Modern World by Barbara O’Brien. Shambhala. 316 pp. $19.95. **** I’ve been asking myself what makes a religion ever since I read Karen Armstrong’s marvelous The Lost Art of Scripture. There, in that cataloging of the world’s vast scriptures, Christianity almost ...Read more
- What Scripture Is ForThe Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts by Karen Armstrong. Knopf. 605 pp. $35.00. ***** The Lost Art of Scripture is a colossal feat of scholarship; I can’t think of one I admire more. Karen Armstrong has studied scriptures from a wide variety of cultures, and summed up the basic messages from the scripture ...Read more
- Repose and Bliss My AssSesshin Strikes Again “The zazen I speak of is not learning meditation. It is simply the Dharma gate of repose and bliss. . . . Traps and snares can never reach it.” Fukanzazengi , Eihei Dogen. I am often struck, let’s make that always struck, by the sick feeling of dread I have every year as our winter ...Read more
- Words For What Is Beyond WordsSecret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions by Jeffrey J. Kripal. University of Chicago Press. 478 pp. Jeffrey J. Kripal is a religious writer like no other I’ve ever read. He grew up as a Catholic in Nebraska, for instance (there are Catholics in Nebraska?) He was devout, actually entered a seminary ...Read more
- Good Could Have Been GreatMy Year of Dirt and Water: Journal of a Zen Monk’s Wife in Japan by Tracy Franz. Stone Bridge Press. 306 pp. $16.95. ***1/2 I don’t believe in publishing pages from a journal. I’m all for keeping a journal (Thoreau is one of my heroes); it’s an invaluable practice to sit down every day and review ...Read more
- If We Just Knew What Mind IsHow to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan. Penguin Press. 465 pp. How’s that for a sub-title? Why didn’t he just add, the Universe? Except that in some ways that does describe what Michael Pollan’s book is about. It’s also about the ...Read more
- Too Much ThinkingCall It Grace: Finding Meaning in a Fractured World by Serene Jones. Viking. 310 pp. ***1/2 Four Men Shaking: Searching for Sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and My Perfect Zen Teacher by Lawrence Shainberg. Shambhala. 134 pp. $16.95. ****1/2 “To stop your mind does not mean to stop the activities of mind. It means your mind ...Read more
- Fools’Paradise a novel by Toni Morrison. Vintage. 318 pp. $16.00 I can agree that Beloved is Toni Morrison’s masterpiece, but in some ways I found Paradise a more inventive and intricate novel. It’s the story of a fictional town in Oklahoma that was settled in the mid-twentieth century by African Americans who had been turned away ...Read more
- And Actually IsThe World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path by Norman Fisher. Shambhala. 207 pp. $17.95. ****1/2 It’s an odd title for a book on Buddhism, which is supposed to devote itself to the world as it is. When Fischer lectured on the book at the Chapel Hill Zen Center, someone asked him about that, ...Read more
- Relaxing the Frontal LobeThe Light That Shines Through Infinity: Zen and the Energy of Life by Dainin Katagiri. Shambhala. 229 pp. $16.95. I’ve always thought of Dainin Katagiri as a difficult Zen teacher, partly because I read Returning to Silence when I was new to Zen and found it confounding. He was a rough contemporary of Shunryu Suzuki, and ...Read more
- Ways to TruthGurdjieff Reconsidered: The Life, the Teachings, the Legacy by Roger Lipsey. Shambhala. 342 pp. $24.95. **** I read this book as a tribute to my friend Levi, who used to talk about Gurdjieff and various of his disciples almost every time we got together. He was introduced to the man by a woman who was breaking ...Read more
- Don’t Fight the WaterZazen in the Spirit of Shinjin The Spring 2019 issue of Tricycle includes a marvelous teaching by Kenneth Tanaka entitled “The Seven Phases of a Drowning Sailor.” Apparently the story itself exists in Shin Buddhism, but Tanaka divided it up into seven parts to indicate stages of realization. He had in mind the Ten Oxherding pictures ...Read more
- Why Not?Why Religion? A Personal Story by Elaine Pagels. Ecco. 235 pp. $27.99 ****1/2 Why Religion? is a slender graceful memoir, a rare thing in these social media days when people think their every moment is worth recording. It is directed at the question which the title asks, which meant different things to author Elaine Pagels at ...Read more
- A Rage to ConnectAt Eternity’s Gate a film by Julian Schnabel. With Willem Dafoe, Rubert Friend, Oscar Isaac, Emmanuelle Seigner. ****1/2 I don’t know how many movies there have been about Vincent Van Gogh, though I myself have seen three or four. I have not seen the 1956 portrayal by Kirk Douglas, and don’t believe I will. Ever since I was a kid ...Read more
- That Sinking FeelingAnother Rohatsu Sesshin Down the Tubes The day before sesshin began—we always start on Friday evening—I told a friend from the Zen Center that I didn’t think I’d be able to have lunch with her on Friday after all. I had too much to do. “Yeah,” she said. “Me too. It’s kind of like you’re preparing ...Read more
- Infinity in a Grain of SandForever a series by Alan Yang and Matt Hubbard. With Maya Rudolph, Fred Armisen, Catherine Keener, Noah Robbins. ***** Forever is one of the most unusual things I’ve ever seen on a screen. It’s composed of eight episodes roughly thirty minutes long, so my wife and I watched it over two nights. The difficulty with writing ...Read more
- Your Body Is the UniverseThe Practice of Pure Awareness: Somatic Meditation for Awakening the Sacred by Reginald Ray. Shambhala. 286 pp. $18.95. ****1/2 It’s said that we read dharma books originally for inspiration, then years later for confirmation of what we’ve learned. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, for instance, I’ve read at least ten times, and it’s been a different book ...Read more
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You Need to be WritingThe Other SideThe River is Freedom, the Raft ParadiseThe Nothing of GodWe Are Stardust We Are Golden
View Other Essays by Topic
aging (114)American literature (197)art (109)Buddhism (163)Christianity (119)creative process (232)death and dying (128)meditation (118)movies (152)music (36)race (95)religion (180)sex (157)spirituality (167)the art of narrative (238)Uncategorized (19)world literature (23)