Today, [October 17] the Dalai Lama is scheduled to meet with President Bush at the White House. Wednesday, Bush and congressional leaders are to present the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner with the Congressional Gold Medal — the highest civilian honor awarded by Congress — during a ceremony in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Thousands of the Dalai Lama's supporters will celebrate on the Capitol's West Lawn.

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Randall Friesen is noticing more and more people are intertested in spiritual direction.

For whatever reasons, it seems that Spiritual Direction has been on the radar of a number of different people and organizations lately. It’s coming up in conversations I’m having with people about leadership, and in peoples personal development stories. Interesting to me is that I’m not initiating those discussions.

He wonders if this is a passing trend or a confluence of new thinking in the world. What do you think?

Spiritual Direction on the Rise

Is the spiritual direction a passing fad? Yes, it seems to be a 1970s style trend that will eventually fade. No, there is a real shift going on in the world, and spiritual direction is an integral part of new thinking. Current Results

 

Click here to read Friesen's original post.

Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship Ministries, recently wrote on the value of having a soul friend. He writes from an evangelical Christian perspective, but his ideas are easily applicable in any tradition.

[T]he amazing disappearing act of deep personal friendships is a tell-tale sign of spiritual malnutrition. Think about it. As Mindy Caliguire asks in her new small-group study guide, Spiritual Friendship, “What do you do when you can’t stand the thought of praying, when the words of the Bible seem plastic and false . . . when you have been doing everything ‘right’ and the bottom falls out?” It’s at these times when it is the spiritual friends who throw us a life-preserver.

Click here to read the entire post.

Mike, an interm Presbyterian pastor in Orlando, Florida, USA, is way too busy. He's been blogging about a book he is reading, The Contemplative Pastor, by Eugene Peterson. Peterson says of busy-ness:

The word busy is the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. It is not devotion but defection. The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterize a wife or embezzling to describe a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront.

Read the full post here.

Anthony Kronman, in the September 16, 2007 edition of the Boston Globe, writes about the failure of colleges and universities to help students grapple with the search for meaning in their lives.

The students who have won this prize are about to enter an academic environment richer than any they have known. They will find courses devoted to every question under the sun. But there is one question for which most of them will search their catalogs in vain: The question of the meaning of life, of what one should care about and why, of what living is for.

He goes on to say:

Our culture may be spiritually impoverished, but what it needs is not more religion. What it needs is an alternative to religion, for colleges and universities to become again the places they once were - spiritually serious but nondogmatic, concerned with the soul but agnostic about God.

Read the entire article here.

[via The Line]

Jenny Phillips, a cultural anthropologist, psychotherapist, and documentary filmmaker, interviewed the 36  prisoners (called “the dhamma brothers”) for her documentary of their participation in a 10-day Vipassana meditation course held at the Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison  outside Birmingham, Alabama, USA.

As Buddhism inches toward the pop culture mainstream, practitioners are taking its tenets of mindfulness, acceptance and compassion to populations in need of spiritual guidance, namely prisons and centers for troubled youths.

Prisoners have been practicing meditation on their own through outreach programs for years. The Prison-Ashram Project began in 1973 and in 1989 the Prison Dharma Network was founded, an umbrella organization now encompassing over 100 prison volunteer groups from different Buddhist traditions.

To see a preview of the documentary, click here.

Read the entire story here [via DallasNews Religion]

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has launched a multilingual Web site whose main purpose is to inform Muslims about Judaism through a forum that allows visitors to post live questions in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Bahasa and English.

The concept for the Web site was developed by Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based organization that focuses on Holocaust remembrance and human rights.

"In an environment where the current perception of Jews is largely shaped by the most extreme elements," Cooper said in a statement Monday, "we have to reach out so that the truth about Jews and Judaism is readily available to Arab and Muslim societies."

[Associated Press via DallasNews Religion]

Angel Kyodo Williams, is a spiritual teacher, activist, artist and founder of New Dharma Meditation Center for Urban Peace. She is the author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace. She serves as guiding teacher and spiritual director of the New Dharma Meditation Center for Urban Peace in Oakland, California, USA, a training center for engaging individual, community, and social transformation as spiritual practice. In the clip below, she says society will be unwilling to bear separation as a way of doing things.

Click To Play

Please share your thoughts about the September issue of Presence: An International Journal of Spiritual Direction. You can fill out a simple survey online and make your thoughts known. Click here to start the evaluation survey.

Pastor Jeff Berg lists seven ways to have a great day at the office. Check out number 6.

6. Engage in personal development. Read a book, watch your sermon on video and see how you can improve, meet with a mentor or spiritual director...do something to better yourself. If you improve yourself as a part of your daily routine, you will feel better about the direction of your life and God's ability to use you.

See the other six here.

Mother Teresa of Calcuta's privite journals and letters are about to be published under the title Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. Exerpts appeared in the the August 23 issue of Time from which we learned that Mother Teresa spent the last decades of her life in an agonizing feeling of separation from God. In a New York Times editorial, James Martin, SJ, comments about her struggle:

Mother Teresa’s “dark night” was of a different magnitude, lasting for decades. It is almost unparalleled in the lives of the saints. In time, with the aid of the priest who acted as her spiritual director, Mother Teresa concluded that these painful experiences could help her identify not only with the abandonment that Jesus Christ felt during the crucifixion, but also with the abandonment that the poor faced daily.

Read the rest of Martin's comments here.

A mid-30s GenX mom blogs about her retreat at Iona:

 

 

I can’t remember what my spiritual director—a jolly Dominican nun just a few years older than I—said in response to all this, though it was almost definitely a question rather than a declaration. But like a flash I realized: when a gate swings shut, it doesn’t just close off a path. It also creates a boundary. A safe space. A refuge.

Read the rest of her post here.

The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.

Read the rest of Mark Lilla's insightful article, "The Politics of God," here.

Rev. Ronald Rolheiser, OMI, recently spoke on “Secularity and the Gospel: Being Missionaries to Our Own Children” as part of the Great Theologians Lecture series at the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry. You can listen to or view the lecture here.

The role of the spiritual mentor is essential in the practice of Tasawwuf. Tasawwuf is the traditional Islamic science of self-improvement and spirituality (sufism), focussing on one's relationship with Allah. The Revivalry blog explains the practice:

 

 

Hence, when one turns to a Spiritual Mentor, it is to reform oneself, and that is the real objective of turning to him is achieved: to imbibe excellent traits, and ward off and crush the unworthy characteristics. This, then, is the true purpose of Tasawwuf. Nevertheless, the Zikr and supplications are also helpful to the seeker. Only through the guidance of the Spiritual Mentor can the regimen of Zikr, supplications and other repetitions be prescribed for every individual according to the Sheikh's opinion of his condition.

You can read more about Tasawwuf and the need for a spiritual mentor here.