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.
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.
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.
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.
Each year, as the Christmas season approaches, I find myself instinctively measuring the present against a backdrop of my Ghanaian childhood.
If someone suffers from hallucinations, paranoia, depression, or intense anxiety in, say, northern India, what can they do? They can visit a Sufi shrine.
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.
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?
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.
All religions should make room for the grown-ups to move toward a more open, meditative, inclusive, deconstructed experience. Maybe we could even hold on to what is best about religion if each denomination stopped insisting it possessed the only truth.