Diogenes Can Teach You How to Say No
To the Cynics, the goal of life was, in literal translation, freedom from smoke—meaning false beliefs, pretense, and shallow lures.
Belief
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Teach a Lesson
Here is what made the difference for me: they take vows, and secretly, they take their work seriously, offering the same combination of ministry, nurture, and social justice activism to the queer and trans communities that traditional nuns offer to the rest of us.
Are You Flourishing?
The modern definition of “flourish” is “to grow or develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly favorable environment.” In “The Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle plays just as fair, acknowledging the difference made by a silver-spoon birth and the finest tutors.
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Have Evolved Yet Again
Rev. Billy started preaching in the late ’90s, outside the Disney store in Times Square, using the company as a symbol of mindless, life-destroying consumerism and unethical practices including sweatshop labor.This act, if it was an act at all, evolved in the two decades since 9-11 to become The Church of Stop Shopping and The Stop Shopping Choir.
How Esther Perel Figures People Out So Fast
Esther Perel knows both pain and resilience: her parents were the only members of their families to survive Nazi camps. She is not afraid, as I often am, to cut into the pain.
My Christmas Seasons in Ghana and the United States
Each year, as the Christmas season approaches, I find myself instinctively measuring the present against a backdrop of my Ghanaian childhood.
How a Sufi Shrine Outperforms Western Medicine
If someone suffers from hallucinations, paranoia, depression, or intense anxiety in, say, northern India, what can they do? They can visit a Sufi shrine.
Can Gratitude Save Us?
Appreciation warms us. It is a gentle form of enthusiasm, which in the original Greek meant to be inspired by—even possessed by—a god. To have the divine inside you, glowing through the folds of viscera.
David Brooks Wants Us to Take Our Conversations Deeper
His talk won the kind of sustained applause that brings soloists back for an encore. In his version, this meant Q&A. How, as a nation, can we get past all this pain?
I Wish I Had the Discipline to Fast
Fasting has been accorded such power, and it has taken so many forms, there must be something to it. Denying oneself can be salutary. It is fun, now and again, to stay up all night.