Sixty years ago, the Catholic contemplative Thomas Merton, who was not blind to the atrocities committed in his own time, could still say that we “exist solely for this, to be the place God has chosen for the divine Presence. The real value of our own self is the sign of God in our...
She thanked me. But the price of my self-definition had been the wall I felt I’d built between us before I ever closed the door. — Sarah Willie I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return…I am not european. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there. I am ...
CBD shops are proliferating, promoting the delightful, amazing gourmet FLAVOR of hemp! Just coming from the USA, where hemp is all about its medicinal properties, I’m finding the French take on hemp surreal. And as I learn more about quantum reality — corresponding to the metaphysical unive...
even banned, in some Catholic countries. But others expressed understandable reservations concerning the slick commercialization of a sacred image in order to sell expensive clothing. The ad agency seemed taken aback by the objections. “We wanted to convey a sort of spirituality...
Thanks be to God, I was soon supplied with angels of mercy—three students, plus a nurse who had finished her shift at a Catholic hospital only two blocks away. These angels helped me hobble to the emergency room. After two days in hospital, I was on the highway home with my wife at...
temporal and eternal, human and divine, and I am grateful that our passage into the New Year falls in the middle of the Christmas feast, enriched by faith’s larger hopes. We are not alone. As the Psalmist cries to the Holy One, “My times are in your hand; deliver me.” (Psalm ...
And from then on I started to believe a lot, I mean, yes, my parents taught me, Yes, I am a Catholic or so, yes of course… but, when I saw that I asked God for things and God helped me, from then on I realised that He does exist [...]”. (15 CM Ba) However, people...
The standard narrative, especially among practitioners, is that the ensuing Afro-Catholic syncretism present in most forms of Candomblé up to this day resulted from the prohibition against worshipping their deities. For example, the deity associated with hunting and usually depicted armed with a bow...
Of all the sacraments in the Catholic Church, baptism is the best kept (Besnard and Desplanques 1987). As part of initiation rites there can be different name-giving ceremonies that may occur at birth or near birth as in baptism or later in life when new names are adopted (Dunkling ...
This paper examines transreligiosity in the context of the transmission of South Asian concepts of spirituality to the UK in the 20th century. Between the 1920s and 1990s, Indian teacher and author Phiroz Mehta (1902–1994) crossed borders in a colonial