Spiritually Speaking

The traditional Buddhist analysis of wisdom (Skt: prajña) allows that there there are three interacting sources: hearing, cognitive consideration and spiritual practice. The earliest disciples of the Buddha were called the “Hearers” (Skt:śrāvaka).

In a couple of days, I will be sitting with my family at the Passover Seder, a meal wrapped in a service of remembrance, with prayers, songs, symbolic foods and the retelling of how G-d took us out of Egypt from slavery to freedom.

Recently I started to pay more attention to how many conversations I have each day about food.

I have been deeply moved by the outpouring of public sympathy and support in the wake of the tragic death of Westshore RCMP Const. Sarah Beckett.

I’m always grateful when Easter comes, and not just because it marks the end of Lent and the beginning of the most important season of the Christian tradition. For me, Easter brings with it a much-needed call to rise and begin again.

(Adrienne Carter with colleagues at the Centre for Victims of Torture, In Jordan. The headquarters for CVT is in Minneapolis, but has branches in many different parts of the world, including Jordan.

Can we guarantee that we will live a happy, healthy, and safe life? Most people strive for this, but no one has found a universal recipe for creating it.

A good friend of mine had just started as minister in a congregation. The widow of the previous minister, who had been at that church for 30 years, was still attending the congregation.

How do we explain new life? We use bunnies, eggs and chicks, butterflies and other images. I like all of these. They reflect our need for images to describe things when words fail.

It makes no rational sense. It defies all that modern science knows about life and death. It seems like a fanciful myth concocted by a bunch of losers to justify the three years of their lives that they had just spent following a failed prophet.