Many of us are chronically distressed by the suffering we see around us. It confronts us in the 24/7 news cycle, in social media, in what we pass on the street every day. We live with a longing to be
…Blog Posts
Originally published on Quaker Universalist Conversations (1/1/17).
I had a dream a few days ago, one of those rare wholly unambiguous dreams. It was a flying dream, but that’s not the relevant feature, just a plot device.
I was returning
You don’t know what will happen if you go down that road. That’s why you should go there.
Why do what you have already done?
The world never changes, and it is never the same. Each step opens a new
…Waiting for Quaker meeting
with a fence of white jasmine
behind me
and the
sun
a bit too warm
I hear from across
another wooden fence
opposite
the shout of the
morning-sobered plumber
stumbling from his
trailer:
“Alright! The first
…Nothing new.
Except perhaps that the the circumstances are more extreme than they have been since I lost my counseling career.
There is this.
…The fixed idea that we have about ourselves as solid and separate from each other is
Originally published on Quaker Universalist Conversations on on 10/19/2015.
Friend Jim Wilson has a helpful comment on the QuakerQuaker republishing of my post, “Seeing beyond Identities”:
Mike, I wonder if your statement, “identities are figments of human conceptualization,
Originally published on 10/4/2015 on Quaker Universalist Conversations
In “Seeing beyond the Projections” (9/7/2015), I voiced my concern that modern Friends across the spectrum tend to perceive liberal or universalist Quakerism as representing anything but Christianity. As
Originally published on 9/7/2015 on Quaker Universalist Conversations
Some recent conversations with Friends revealed that they considered Quaker Universalism to represent anything but Christianity. This is not surprising either psychologically or historically, yet it misses the core premise of