Generalizing
about a religion is a dangerous thing. A generalization that had seemed safe
was that Buddhism is a peaceful religion. It's all about compassion, isn't
it—about renouncing desire and learning to empty yourself?
A woman came to my house recently whose
husband I had helped put in jail the day before. One day she felt afraid of his
violence. The next she felt ambivalent about her choice, and she wanted my help
to get him out of jail. While I had helped her call the police, I wasn't
willing to pay his bond.
Nature's Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm
Back in the '70s when Steven Apfelbaum told his mom he was
studying for a degree in ecology, his mother didn't know what to think. Unable
to accept or perhaps even understand this new specialty, she told friends that
"Little Stevie was going to be a veterinarian." She wasn't the only one
wondering.
Unfinished Business
One Man's Extraordinary Year of Trying to Do the Right Things
Lee Kravitz loved his job as editor in chief of Parade magazine.
But like his ancestors before him, he was a workaholic. Most of the men
in his family worked until they died, usually from heart attacks in
their early 60s.
“Today, we live with this illusion that we know the world," says
William Dalrymple. "The reality, of course, is. . .that there's huge
parts of the world which we know absolutely nothing about, particularly
in areas of religion and philosophy." For most of us, India is one of
those places.
One in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage. But as United Methodist
pastor Elise Erikson Barrett points out, we don’t much like to talk
about miscarriage.
The problem with liberal theology, Protestant or Catholic, says Rodney A. Howsare in Balthasar: A Guide for the Perplexed,
is that Christ comes too late into the picture.
Here’s something creationists and evolutionary naturalists agree about:
Darwin’s theory of evolution leads inevitably to atheism. John F.
Haught disagrees. In Making Sense of Evolution, he proposes that one need not choose between God and Darwin.
