Category: christianity

There’s Not Enough!
It’s a State of Mind How’s your supply of toilet paper these days? I always found it weird that, when faced with a mysterious pandemic of epic proportions, the first thing most Americans thought of was wiping their butts. Maybe they were just buying paper towels to wipe down surfaces (which we recently discovered, after doing ...
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Not a Matter of Belief
Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist by Stephen Bachelor. Random House. 320 pp. $14.99 Some years ago, when I was trying to get my head around Christianity, I read various works by C.S. Lewis, including Mere Christianity. Lewis is widely regarded as an effective proselytizer for the religion, offering not a passionate but a reasonable approach to ...
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Portrait of the Artists Through a Boozy Haze
Early Novels and Stories by James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country. Library of America. 970 pp. In the midst of the endless current theorizing about race and sexuality and gender identity, and talk of all the books we must read (I hate to be told I must read a book), ...
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Things Will Never Be That Way Again
Sound of Metal a film by Darius Marder. With Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cook, Paul Raci, Lauren Ridloff. ***** I almost stopped watching Sound of Metal during the first five minutes. I’m not a fan of heavy metal and didn’t want to spend two hours listening to what I heard in those early minutes. I didn’t need ...
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That’s Not the Choice
Reflections on The Friend In Sigrid Nunez’ superb novel The Friend, the narrator is thinking back on a friend who has just died, and mentions that he was a committed atheist. “Between religion and knowledge, he said, a person must choose knowledge.” I almost jumped out of my chair as I read that. That’s not the ...
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Sitting with Louis
Notes During a Pandemic We came to stay at our Asheville cabin during the pandemic in order to take care of my wife’s brother Louis, who has a house on the same property. He’s 68 years old and autistic, diagnosed just a few years ago. His job was bringing in shopping carts at the local supermarket, ...
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Or Something Like That
Zen in the West a film by Daniel Luke Fitch. With Henry Shukman Roshi, Yamada Ryoun Roshi, David Loy Roshi, Reuben Habito Roshi, Venerable Dr. Parravati. Part of Tricycle’s BuddhaFest Online. ***1/2. I rarely sign up for anything like BuddhaFest, the yearly event that Tricycle puts on, but this year, since it’s strictly virtual, and they’re ...
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Facing Desire
Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life. Insights from Buddhism & Psychotherapy by Mark Epstein. Gotham Books. 227 pp. ***1/2 The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-80. Edited by Ian S. MacNiven. New Directions. 528 pp. $21.89 In Open to Desire, psychiatrist and longtime Buddhist practitioner Mark Epstein takes on the central paradox of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. ...
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Was Jung a Mystic?
Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Carl Jung’s Life and Teachings a new biography by Gary Lachman. Tarcher/Penguin258 pp. $24.95. This is my first biography of Jung, and I’m not at all sure this is the one to start with. Years ago, when my first marriage ended and I was going through a personal crisis, ...
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All Religions Converge One Point
The Universal Christ by Richard Rohr. Convergent. 260 pp. $27.00 ***** For my devotional reading these days, I’ve been reading both The Universal Christ and Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Rohr’s book seemed largely theoretical (though he mentions various practices) and Shunryu Suzuki’s perfectly practical: almost every section is about sitting. Somehow or other I finished both ...
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Emptiness and Grace
Jesus and Buddha: Practicing Across Traditions. A film by Jon Ankele. With Paul Knitter, Father Robert Kennedy, Chung Hyun Kyung. Available at Amazon Prime. ***** I’m obsessed with the Buddhist-Christian dialogue. That’s partly because I’m married to a Catholic—a highly unconventional one—but also because I was raised in the Christian tradition and never shook it ...
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Doing Time
Notes During a Pandemic Living in self-isolation, I’ve been thinking of the inmates I’ve known through the years, as part of our prison outreach at the Chapel Hill Zen Center. The first was at Pender Correctional in Burgaw; I became his pen pal and eventually visited from time to time. He told me at our first visit ...
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Prophet Without Honor
Back to the Basics When I was coming to our Asheville cabin to help look after my wife’s autistic brother, I faced a sudden decision: what spiritual books do I bring (and not too many). My car was already cluttered enough. I decided on the old stand-bys: Shunryu Suzuki, Dainin Katagiri, and Chogyam Trungpa (whom I ...
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The Process of Growth
Notes 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 ...
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Deluded Fool
Zazen 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 ...
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Coming Together by Being Apart
In 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 ...
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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 ...
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What Scripture Is For
The 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 ...
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Repose and Bliss My Ass
Sesshin 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 ...
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Words For What Is Beyond Words
Secret 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 ...
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