Human-reality is free because it is not enough. –Sartre Within minutes of striking, the earthquake that shook Iran in 2003 claimed 30,000 souls. The disaster focused local and international governments and every type of aid group. After the tremors subsided in Bam, politics narrowed to the effort to find and save lives. In its immediate…
Exploring being in the world, proclaiming life signified nothing, analyzing assumptions and developing syntheses were once the domain of philosophy and literature. Attempts were made to understand the whole of human existence. Gradually, grand theories about life became replaced by adoration of science. Whether or not there was a palace of wisdom seemed less relevant…
An interpretation of Mahatma Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent movements as ventures for reforming society that are rooted in altruism and spiritual transformation.
“Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word ‘race’ has a fair claim to being the most common, the most ambiguous, and the most explosive.” — Jacques Barzun, Race: A Study in Superstition, 1937 We start with a quiz: what did Eve look like? Quickly, now! Sorry, there’s no…
In a generous comment on my book The Yoga of the Christ,[1] the justly highly regarded comparative religionist, Huston Smith, hailed it as a “landmark in interfaith dialogue.” However, I have become increasingly uneasy about this comment because I do not believe that I was engaging in interfaith dialogue in that book or in any…
Ralph Waldo Emerson once remarked that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Well, I admit it. I’m spooked. The problem of how one can consistently maintain a hope in a benevolent metaphysical reality while simultaneously accepting the accumulated evidence for a Darwinian model of organic evolution is not, I suppose, a simple…
Complexity is all around us. Complexity is in eco-systems. Where do they begin and where do they end, and what should count as the minimal unit of an ecosystem? Complexity is in the brain. How does a brain function, if the neurons are continuously altered in consequence of their interaction? Complexity is in economy. What…
Introduction: Contemporary Crisis The condition of contemporary moral and political thought stands in stark contrast to over two thousand years of prior understandings. Unlike the syncretic culture of the Greco-Roman world, in which one understood that the practice of virtue, law, and right conduct was situated within an enveloping and dominant framework of cultural…
After reading the valuable contributions posted on the Meta Listserver, and listening to the many enlightening and often inspiring presentations at the New York concurrent State of the World 2000 and Future Visions meetings, I suggest the following as important issues that should be taken up, and could form the basis of interlinked research and…
Michael Horace Barnes, Stages of Thought: The Co-Evolution of Religious Thought and Science (Oxford University Press, 2000). Stages of Thought is a historical analysis of major stages of religious thought and science in cultures around the world, and then of the special developments in the West since the sixteenth century that led to…