The Meaning of Life and Other Minor Details: Practicing Mindfulness After Fifty

Spiritual Audacity and Radical Amazement Last week I discovered a document I never knew existed: the manifesto signed by 80 Protestant ministers in Atlanta in November 1957 in response to President Eisenhower’s sending federal troops into Little Rock to allow Black children to go to schools in their own neighborhoods (See   http://rccapilgrims.ning.com/profiles/blogs/80-atlanta-pastors-sign ). Later in the week, and completely coincidentally, I began reading the work of Rabbi Abraham Heschel, whose name kept appearing in my research on curriculum and ethics. I’m not talking about a few citations. I mean every time, his well-placed words were used by non-theological scholars to knock their points out of the ballpark. Sometimes God knocks me over the head with stuff. Rabbi Heschel was born in Poland in 1907, to an Orthodox Jewish family. He studied philosophy at the University of Berlin while also studying for rabbinic ordination. When the Nazis took over, he was arrested by the Gest...

**Note: This post is a devotional written for a congregational newsletter. I'm putting it here as a repository. So if this kind of writing isn't particularly your thing, hang around, I'll be back as the reprobate soon. Psalms 27:6-7 Then my head will be exalted      above the enemies who surround me; at his sacred tent I will sacrifice   with shouts of joy;      I will sing   and make music   to the   Lord . 7  Hear my voice   when I call,   Lord ;      be merciful to me and answer me. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Prayerbook of the Bible In 1940 Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote an 84-page meditation on the Psalms called Prayerbook of the Bible , in which he explains the importance of the Psalms for Christian prayer. I can’t think of Psalms now without thinking of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who wrote concerning them, “Along these lines the Holy Scriptures tell us that the first thought and the first word of ...