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 Persona – the Mask of the Soul
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 …
A Tale of Two Myths
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 – What’s in a Name?
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 …
Triangulating
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 …
Here’s How Jungian Psychology Feeds the Soul
EXPERIMENTAL AND BEHAVIORAL PSYCHOLOGIES DENY THE SOUL, and psychoanalytic psychologies explain away meaning. Jungian psychology does neither. Instead, it maps out a path toward a post-critical, re-enchantment of life. In our post-Enlightenment, postmodern world, psychology should help us understand the soul, because “psyche” means “soul.” Unfortunately, experimental and behavioral psychologies ignore the soul altogether by …
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When Something Ordinary Is Extraordinary
SOMETIMES SOMETHING HAPPENS that makes no sense, but isn’t nonsense. Instead, it seems eerily significant; uncanny, yet meaningful. You know it’s just a coincidence, but it feels like a touch of enchantment, like the flow of Dao, like providence or maybe fate. A meaningful coincidence like that, according to Carl Jung, is synchronicity at work …
“Life is change. How it differs from the rocks.”
In 1968, Jefferson Airplane released Crown of Creation, their fourth album, in which the political facet of their psychedelic rock became clearly visible. The album’s title track, written by Paul Kantner, blends philosophical insight with countercultural attitude in a song that, in the end, turns out to be a love song. The song’s closing lines …
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René Descartes, Meet Peggy Lee
“EGO” IS IMPLIED IN DESCARTES’ (IN)FAMOUS EPIGRAM: “COGITO ERGO SUM.” In English, it’s explicit: “I think, therefore I am.” I feel it should be emphatic. Intended to be a statement that could not be denied, Descartes’ epigram only holds in a world without Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Sufism, or any form of self-transcending mystical experience. As …
Where Is Heaven?
THE QUESTION IS IRRATIONAL. It assumes the word “heaven” refers to an actual place. For more than 2,500 years, however, rational thinkers in the West have known heaven to be a mythic location, not a physical reality. Our image of heaven is a survival from a primordial model of the universe in which the earth …
Soul Spirit Wisdom 