Depth psychology, religion, spirituality, and more
ALTHOUGH MOST OF THE TIME MOST OF US DON’T RECOGNIZE IT, organizations have souls. Our ancient ancestors felt the presence of spirits everywhere, animating everything. Plato abstracted that ancient intuition into a theory of ideal heavenly archetypes standing behind all material forms. By Roman times, St. Paul and other early Christian writers could talk about …
Continue reading "Why “Powers” and “Principalities” Still Hold Sway"
Discover a Side of Jesus You've Never Seen Before “Jesus and the Feminine in John” — a 5-week course on Zoom In mythology, a deity who dies and rises on the third day is a moon god, a son of the Great Mother. The good news of Christ says Jesus died and rose on the …
THE ARC OF SPIRITUALITY IS BENDING TOWARD INCLUSIVITY. Some 3,200 years ago, Ramesses II, pharaoh of the New Kingdom in ancient Egypt, presented himself to his people and the world as the son of the high god Ra, and as a god himself. In the highest of ancient civilizations, spirituality was a strictly royal phenomenon. …
Continue reading "Breathing a Wind That Blows Where It Will"
MOST OF US STRUGGLE MOST OF OUR LIVES TO BECOME AUTHENTIC, to find and actualize our “true selves.” The struggle typically begins during the sturm und drang, the “storm and stress,” of adolescence, but no one fully quiets the storm as a teenager. If you’re fortunate, your teenage struggles lead to a relatively stable adult …
THE GOSPEL OF JOHN, THE “SPIRITUAL GOSPEL,” CASTS A DARK SHADOW — especially in English. The Fourth Gospel is known and loved for the light it shines on spiritual reality and the mystic path. How, then, could it also have justified racist prejudice and deadly persecution for millennia? The answer, in large part, lies in …
Continue reading "The News in the Gospel Hasn’t Always Been Good"
An Action Movie with a Twist Last night, as we finished watching WW 84, the latest installment in the new Wonder Woman film franchise, I felt a touch of synchronicity at play. In my previous blog post, “A Tale of Two Myths,” I spoke about murder mysteries as manifestations of the Myth of Redemptive Knowledge, …
WHY ARE MURDER MYSTERY SHOWS ON TV SO CAPTIVATING? Why am I hooked on The Closer, Major Crimes, Midsomer Murders, Death in Paradise, and the like? It’s because they tell archetypal stories that re-affirm the truth of one of humanity’s two most powerful meta-myths. The “Myth of Redemptive Violence” is probably the dominant myth of …
MARY MAGDALENE IS THE FIRST WITNESS TO THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS, according to the Gospel of John (20:1, 11-18), but she isn’t the “redeemed whore” of traditional Christian devotion. The Johannine portrait show us, instead, a towering woman of prophetic and spiritual power. The tradition that makes the Magdalene a prostitute grew out of a …
JUST AS COMPARING BIBLE TRANSLATIONS HELPS US UNDERSTAND both specific passages and the Bible as a whole, so comparing religious traditions helps us understand both specific traditions and religious phenomena more broadly. Comparative study brings witnesses with differing points of view into play, in the hope they’ll clarify one another. Last week, while re-reading The …
Circumambulating Reaching the midpoint, looking across to the idiosyncratic starting point of this new epicycle … What’s the point? To share, to give back, to give out what I’ve taken in; an intellectual potlatch of sorts. If Sophia’s bread is on the table, how many will accept the invitation? Or …
Soul Spirit Wisdom 