No longer content to hike the Appalachian trail or climb Denali, devout secularists have turned their sights on pilgrim routes. One such route is the Way of St. James which wends through rugged French terrain, up and over the Pyrenees, and across the desolate plains of Northern Spain until it reaches the city of Santiago, [...]
Archive for the ‘Prayer’ Category
#46 Hikers on Pilgrim Routes: A Cautionary Tale
Posted in God, Prayer, Spiritual Exercises, Spirituality, Theology, tagged pilgrimages, Santiago de Compostela, Way of St. James on July 14, 2010 | 3 Comments »
#45 Take to the sea for four days of Lent
Posted in God, Prayer, Spiritual Exercises, Theological Ethics, Theology, tagged Howard Westwood, Lenten Manual on February 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Courage! Howard Westwood’s 1939 Lenten Manual uses outdated, high-flown language, is written in the mode of all-men-all-of-the-time, and mentions several, mostly-forgotten dead people. Still, his exercises and meditations are worth a look. Besides, Lent isn’t supposed to be easy. So, as Westwood might say, abandon your safe haven and sail into the high seas of [...]
#43 Countdown to exams, gotta go go go
Posted in God, Prayer, Religion, Theology, tagged A. Powell Davies on December 24, 2009 | 1 Comment »
It hardly seems possible, but a full year has passed since my first post! Forty-two posts later, the time has come for me to set blogging aside. With Ph.D. exams scheduled for February, 2010, I must focus on my studies and nothing but my studies. When I launched this blog, little did I expect the [...]
#29 Wisdom, Prophecy and God
Posted in God, Prayer, Religion, Theology, tagged forgiveness, Midrash, redemption on July 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
A Situation: The man gazed guiltily at his old friend across his congealing plate of huevos rancheros. He’d flown into Albuquerque the day before, two months after he’d watched his wife lose her battle with breast cancer. Now, as he ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant, he agonized over the affair he’d had during his [...]
#21 Love like the whip used to start a top
Posted in God, Prayer, Spiritual Exercises, Spirituality, Theology, tagged Francisco de Osuna, lectio divina, Recollection on May 5, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Those who turn over part of their day to spiritual exercises know that a process like the four-step lectio divina process takes dedication and practice. Without a doubt, the more transcendent the God, the harder it is to reach that God. Because smart readers want to know, and there were smart readers during the late medieval [...]
#20 God: only four short steps away
Posted in God, Prayer, Religion, Spiritual Exercises, Spirituality, tagged lectio divina, Pablo Neruda on April 28, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Stuff in books can help us pray. The monastics prayed through divine reading – in fact, a twelfth-century Carthusian monk by name of Guigo II worked out the four-step process that’s been in use ever since. And what are those four steps? Reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation. You’ll want to select a passage—a paragraph from a book, [...]
#12 God without clothes: what would s/he look like?
Posted in God, Philosophy of Religions, Prayer, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theology on February 26, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Is God unknowable, beyond the possibility of the human mind to comprehend? There are plenty of good reasons to be intentional about keeping God abstract. To preserve the one God as a word of appeal for every person, regardless of whether that person is male or female, is most easily achieved by denying that God has [...]
#11 What’s in a name? God, G-d, G*d
Posted in God, Philosophy of Religions, Prayer, Religion, Theology on February 19, 2009 | 11 Comments »
A quick glance at a few different faith traditions shows just how many ways there are to speak about the divine. For example, some traditional Jews won’t say the word God because they believe that it is too holy to pronounce. One is forbidden from making any representations of God—even in speech. When reading the [...]
#9 Build-a-prayer workshop
Posted in God, Prayer, Religion, Theology on February 5, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Your views on God (your theology) affect what you say when you pray. Not sure what to call God when you pray? Not sure how to start your prayers? Not even sure how to pray? Here are three steps to help you come up with your own prayers and discover your theology at the same time. Yup. You get two for the [...]
#8 Prayer: getting intimate with God
Posted in God, Prayer, Religion, Spirituality, Theology on January 31, 2009 | 1 Comment »
For most people of faith, religion is more than a philosophical discussion. And for most, “God is the God of religion only when He is our God and we can speak to Him.” Rabbi Leo Baeck wrote those words. He ministered to Jews imprisoned in Theresienstadt before they were shipped to Nazi death camps. He also wrote that [...]
The Naked Theologian
is a Unitarian Universalist minister working on a Ph.D. in Theology
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