SPIRITUALITY

Spirituality: What A Concept - Spirituality is often confused for religion, but religion and spirituality are not the same thing. Spirituality can be a part, a component, of religion. But you can also have that component outside of religion, as a direct relationship with the spirit (your spirit, the Holy Spirit, God, Buddha, etc…) There is a very specific benefit to this one-on-one relationship, which we’ll go into in a bit.

The John Templeton Foundation - The Foundation takes on the Big Questions of human purpose and ultimate reality. It supports research on subjects ranging from complexity, evolution, and infinity to creativity, forgiveness, love, and free will. It is a wonderful source of reference material for exploring our spirituality.

The Unity Church - Unity is a positive, practical, progressive approach to Christianity based on the teachings of Jesus and the power of prayer. Unity honors the universal truths in all religions and respects each individual's right to choose a spiritual path.

Why Our Universe Must Have Been Born Inside a Black Hole - A small change to the theory of gravity implies that our universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born.

RE-INVENTING THE BODY, RESURRECTING THE SOUL by Deepak Chopra. I enjoyed Deepak’s thoughts surrounding that he was not able to accept that God made us, the mystery of life being outsourced to Genesis, case closed. Neither was he able to turn to science, the big bang without a loving, caring Creator. To him, the journey is the answer. “The process of re-inventing the body and resurrecting the soul is a journey, and the journey never ends”. Something to think about.

The Case for God by Karen Armstrong. I enjoyed Karen’s view of God not necessarily being a person like entity but that a fundamental reality transcends human thoughts and concepts and can only be known through devoted religious practise.
“Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?

Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is “to help us live creatively, peacefully, and even joyously with realities for which there are no easy explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.” “ (Amazon.com)

AGAPE is an interesting spiritual community that I find interesting as I go through life’s journey.