Gita/Gandhi
Not agitated By grief nor hankering after pleasure, They livs free from lust and fear and anger. Fettered no more by selfish attachments, They are not elated by good fortune Nor depressed by bad. Such…
Category: Wisdom Traditions
A New-Old Saintliness
On Maria Clara Bingemer, Simone Weil: Mystic of Passion and Compassion French intellectual Simone Weil has had many biographers, interpreters, and critics since she died in 1943. Brazilian liberation theologian Maria Clara Bingemer’s recent…
A New-Old Saintliness
On Maria Clara Bingemer, Simone Weil: Mystic of Passion and Compassion French intellectual Simone Weil has had many biographers, interpreters, and critics since she died in 1943. Brazilian liberation theologian Maria Clara Bingemer’s recent…
Liz, Here’s Another Work to Add to the Wisdom Literature List
But the whole teaching, the “way” contained in these anecdotes, poems, and meditations, is characteristic of a certain mentality found everywhere in the world, a certain taste for simplicity, for humility, self-effacement, silence, and in…
The Good News of Giving and Receiving Books, 6.26.2017
Ten years ago, because of a Social Justice theology class, I got to know Melissa Banerjee, a Bengali-American. It made sense to me to give her a hardback edition of the The Gospel of Sri…
Call Me by My True Names
35 years ago today, I participated in the mass demonstration in New York City against nuclear arms. While there, I heard Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh read aloud this English translation of one of…
Seeing the World/1 [from The Book of Mev]
The second week of that Summer Program at Maryknoll, Mev made an announcement after one of the morning sessions that she was going to present some of her photographs in a slideshow/meditation on a night…
Learning by Heart, the Joy of Music, and the Power of the Prophetic
Dear Lauren, I received your letter today about the online Good News class and your hand-written adaptation of Kipling’s famous poem. The fact that you have had “If” as a companion in your work and…
Spiritual Passage to India
Love everyone, feed everyone, and remember God. Neem Karoli Baba I recently gave Ram Dass’s Be Here Now to Laura, an exceptional Maryville University graduate and psychology major. Previously, I had mentioned to her that…
At Home in the World: A Summer Writing Class 2017
Thich Nhat Hanh is regarded by many as one of the most skillful and pragmatic of spiritual teachers. In 2016 he published At Home in the World, a succinct autobiography of his ninety years of…