"Dear Mr. President,
Maybe you should ban all Christians from the military.
People who love their enemies don't make good soldiers."
--Shane Claiborne

"Presence and Process is an amazing book. It provides the best, most compact introduction I've come across to key concepts like mysticism, contemplation, and process theology. It explores the productive ferment that is taking place at the intersection of Christianity and Buddhism. And it invites practitioners to imagine a new kind of church for the journey before us. I highly recommend Presence and Process."

- BRIAN D. MCLAREN, author of The Great Spiritual Migration,  We Make the Road by Walking and A New Kind of Christianity

Amazon is listing Presence and Process as the #1 new release in Quaker Christianity.

https://www.amazon.com/Presence-Process-Transformative-Inclusive-Community/dp/1594980411

"At any moment, you have a choice, that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it."

--Thích Nhất Hạnh

My book, Presence and Process, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. Ships August 1st.

"What would it mean for Christians to rediscover their faith not as a problematic system of beliefs, but as a just and generous way of life, rooted in contemplation and expressed in compassion, that makes amends for its mistakes and is dedicated to beloved community for all? Could Christians migrate from defining their faith as a system of beliefs to expressing it as a loving way of life?"

--Fr. Richard Rohr
https://cac.org/system-beliefs-way-life-2017-07-16/

"If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species."

--Carl Sagan

"Ethical integrity requires both the intelligence to understand the present situation as the fruition of former choices, and the courage to engage with it as the arena for the creation of what is to come. It empowers us to embrace the ambiguity of a present that is simultaneously tied to an irrevocable past and free for an undetermined future. Ethical integrity is not moral certainty. A priori certainty about right and wrong is at odds with a changing and unreliable world, where the future lies open, waiting to be born from choices and acts. Such certainty may be consoling and strengthening, but it can blunt awareness of the uniqueness of each ethical moment. When we are faced with the unprecedented and unrepeateable complexities of this moment, the question is not 'What is the right thing to do?' but 'What is the compassionate thing to do?' This question can be approached with integrity but not with certainty. In accepting that every action is a risk, integrity embraces the fallibility that certainty disdainfully eschews."

-- Stephen Batchelor

It is quite a paradigm shift to think of oneself as an occasion rather than an object; not a what but a when.
-DC

There is a way to live our daily life that transforms normal life into a spiritual life. Even very simple things, like drinking tea with mindfulness can be a deeply spiritual experience, which can enrich our lives. Why would people spend two hours just drinking one cup of tea? From a business viewpoint, this is a waste of time. But time is not money. Time has much more value than money. Time is life. Money is nothing compared with life. In two hours of drinking tea together, we don’t get money, but we do get life.

- Thich Nhat Hanh, At Home in the World

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”
--Soren Kierkegaard

Spent some quality telephone time yesterday with the publisher, going over last minute odds and ends before my book Presence and Process goes off to the printers today. It will make its first public appearance on July 24th at the Northwest Yearly Meeting of Friends in Newberg, OR. Yay!

"Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom."

--Viktor Frankl

"The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another."
--Thomas Merton

"All thoughts—good thoughts, bad thoughts, lovely thoughts, evil thoughts—occur within something. All thoughts arise and disappear into a vast space. If you watch your mind, you’ll see that a thought simply occurs on its own—it arises without any intention on your part. In response to this, we’re taught to grab and identify with them. But if we can, just for a moment, relinquish this anxious tendency to grab our thoughts, we begin to notice something very profound: that thoughts arise and play out, spontaneously and on their own, within a vast space; the noisy mind actually occurs within a very, very deep sense of quiet."

--Adyashanti, Falling Into Grace

"The man who really thinks he has an idea will always try to explain that idea. The charlatan who has no idea will always confine himself to explaining that it is much too subtle to be explained."
— G. K. Chesterton

New Patheos blog post: Spiritual Gifts

Excerpt: "Maybe God is more creative than five or seven or twelve or twenty-five spiritual gifts to choose from.  And maybe what's more important is simply learning to discern the movements of the Holy Spirit within oneself and then follow those leadings."

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danielpcoleman/2017/07/spiritual-gifts/

"The truth can take care of itself.  You don't have to approach the truth with eyes lowered and gaze averted on bended knee; that's how you approach bullshit, but the truth is so powerful that you can kick the tires, turn over the engine, check the odometer, and nobody is offended.  Truth is real.  It can stand the test."

--Terence McKenna

"The objection to Puritans is not that
they try to make us think as they do,
but that they try to make us do as they think."

— H. L. Mencken