Im/practical Mysticism

I will be leading a meditation retreat on Star Island, July 12 -19, 2008.

Check out www.StarMeditation.org for more information.

 

 

 

In the glossary I am writing at my spirituality workshop StudioZero.org, I finally got around to composing an entry for interfaith.

It took a while to get my head around what I wanted to say, because I have observed people use interfaith in such a variety of ways.  Eventually, I deciphered two major camps: people who think of interfaith as communication happening between established religions, and people who think of interfaith as being a common ground where many religions can be combined or unified.

To me, one of the most interesting questions on the subject of interfaith spirituality is: do you have to belong to one particular religion before you do fruitful interfaith work, or can you belong to an interfaith "place" that transcends particular religions?  There are widely diverging answers to that question -- which often go unstated in differing understandings of this word interfaith.

Still, I like this word for getting dialog started...

The newly formed Unitarian Universalist Spiritual Directors' Network has published its first web site. So far, it is mostly a membership directory of about 50 spiritual directors across the US, and a couple in Canada and the UK. Soon they will be adding articles and other information to the site.

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia based on the wiki model, in which anyone can submit, edit or update an article. That model of open collaboration is particularly interesting when the subject is religious. Since anyone can edit their own religious point of view into the articles, the texts evolve democratically into rich surveys of wide-ranging beliefs and perspectives – living documents of interfaith dialog-in-progress.

See their article on mysticism for a good example of such interfaith process in action.

I am in the midst of constructing a "virtual spirituality workshop" called StudioZero.org, so that I can offer online classes. I want to host classes on how to meditate, contemplative psychology, spiritual pathfinding, mystical theology, and so on.

The first two pieces of it, an Introduction to Meditation workshop and a Glossary of Contemplative Terminology, are in testing mode and almost complete. Take a look!

The site is based on a powerful courseware engine, or "virtual learning environment" called Moodle.

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