What the Beatitudes Teach About ‘A Community Of Goodwill’ By Tod Lindberg The sermon on the mount has long been rightly understood as both a starting-point and a summation of Jesus’s teaching. It begins with the Beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-12), in which Jesus delineates the categories of people he says enjoy special favor. The Beatitudes are […]

Good books continue to proliferate.let’s look at some recent ones that should appeal to readers, depending on one’s interests. http://www.themennonite.org/issues/10-12/articles/Books_on_peace_empire_spirituality

On the wall of the home for the dying Mother Teresa had a liturgy for loving:-. Anyway. People can be unreasonable, illogical and self-centred. Love them anyway. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish motives. Do good anyway. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. People really […]

  Loving is treating others – not as we have been treated – as we would like to be treated.  It is extending the same kind of acceptance and respect and resolute positive regard to others that we would like ourselves. It is creating the same kind of opportunities for others to participate in community […]

 No clearer demonstration of what God’s realm is intended to look like exists than the one found in the life and ministry of Jesus. In a society that was both hierarchical and patriarchal, Jesus offered, through his actions and words, a liberating vision of power and its use. Jesus is the reference point for the […]

In his thoughtful book The Company of Strangers, Quaker educator Parker Palmer launches a critique of what he calls our culture’s “ideology of intimacy”—a nest of attitudes that together posit that the main purpose of human life is the development of autonomous, individual personalities and that this development takes place only within the context of […]

Lord Jesus, who fled the wrath of Herod, be with those who have to flee the injustice of others. Lord Jesus, who had nowhere to lay your head, be with those who have no land to call their own. Help us, Lord, who are the privileged inn-keepers of our day, to find room for those […]

  Letting go is just letting things be as they are. Not holding onto anything that would hold us back from moving on and becoming the human/humane person we are called to be. ‘When we learn just to let things be as they are they gradually lose their power over us’. Letting go is not […]

As a scholar in theology and a person who believes in a loving and creative life force at the centre of all things, I nevertheless respectfully place my perspective alongside those of others who may come from a totally different understanding of reality. Hope is, in itself, an act of faith – not, of course, […]

We long for silence, and yet we are afraid of silence. For when the outer world is quiet, we begin to hear our inner noise. Our heads are filled with chatter, our hearts with emotions. We replay history and rehearse the future. We wander away from the present moment by making lists, or planning supper, […]

Confucianism – Do not do to others what you would not like yourself. Then there will be no resentment against you, either in the family or in the state. (Analects 12:2) Buddhism – Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful(Udana-Varga 5,1) Christianity – In everything do to others as you would […]

We know that we can’t change the past. We know that can’t undo the pain. However, some of us try to heal the pain we have suffered by inflicting pain on the people who made us suffer. As if their suffering more would somehow result in our suffering less. But the desire for revenge usually […]