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.

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