Redefining Progressive Christianity, The Living Hour combines scripture, literature, philosophy, and science to rediscover a life of faith, reason, wonder, & joy.
Book of Zen
At LivingHour.org we believe that brevity is not just the soul of wit but of the spiritual path. That is why we are fans of the new website BookofZen.com. Check out the Book of Zen for original daily zen koans that will get you thinking, loving, learning, and living. Written from an outpost in rural Thailand, the Book of Zen offers its koans in both English and Thai. Here are a few of our favorites: Koan 50 (Book of Zen) Living honestly sometimes means dealing from the bottom of the deck. - บางครั้งการมีชีวิตอย่างซื่อสัตย์หมายถึงการแจกไพ่จากด้านล่างของกองไพ่ Koan...
Tom Robbins on Religion, God, & The Spiritual Life
Tom Robbins is the kind of author who people often say you either love or hate. All things considered, that is probably the best kind of author to be, as it reflects that level of truth telling which always inspires radically opposing emotions in others. Robbins is also the kind of author that we at The Living Hour would identify as an excellent example of the SBNR Progressive Christian, even though he would undoubtedly not describe himself in such terms. Regardless, Robbins displays the kind of attitude, wisdom, and joie de vivre that we admire. The following are selected quotes from Tom Robbins covering the subject of God, religion,...
Carpe Diem, My Captain?
Oh, Captain, My Captain! The film The Dead Poet’s Society inspired a generation of young creatives with its refrain of “Carpe Diem” (seize the day). Robin Williams (aka Professor John Keating) urged his students to make your lives extraordinary while standing memorably before a school photograph of alumni who had long become “worm’s meat”. Yet most of us live decidedly unextraordinary lives, while licking the wounds of our would-be greatness. Why does this happen? Well, it’s because life is not the brass ring at a merry-go-round. It can’t be seized and pulled to our breast, to have and to...
Follow Your Bliss?
Thanks to Bill Moyer’s excellent 1988 documentary of Joseph Campbell, called The Power of Myth (likely available at your local library), the scholar Campbell became a myth-guru famous for his dictum that we should “follow our bliss”: If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. On the surface this sounds like good advice. Indeed, many people have adopted Campbell’s words...
Al Franken & Daily Affirmations
Back in the late 1980s, the comedian (now U.S. Senator) Al Franken created the memorable character of Stuart Smalley, a mock self-help guru with a show called Daily Affirmations. Franken lampooned the self-help craze and affirmation trend of the ’80s and early ’90s with such classic lines as “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.” The problem that Franken saw with affirmations was that they are, in a sense, a kind of brainwashing. It just may be that right now you are not smart enough, or good enough, or likable enough to achieve your goals. That doesn’t mean you can’t...
M. Scott Peck’s Road Less Traveled – Life is Difficult
The late M. Scott Peck begins his wildly successful bestseller The Road Less Traveled with the following pronouncement: Life is difficult. This is the great truth, one of the greatest truths–it is a great truth because once we see this truth, we transcend it. Peck’s train of thought finds its lineage in the Buddha’s 4 Noble Truths, the first of which is: all life is suffering. Although Jesus and Buddha share much common ground, on this issue they diverge. Jesus’s gospel does not teach that “life is difficult” but rather “we MAKE life difficult” both for ourselves and others. Jesus praises...
Common Decency
In Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, there is a curious character named Tarrou who organizes the volunteer sanitary teams in the city of Oran, a town afflicted by the bubonic plague. He also assists the lead doctor in his rounds helping patients. Tarrou does this for no other reason he says than his code of morals, which he defines as “common decency“. A little bit later in the book, though, he mentions to the doctor that he is driven by the desire to become a saint. The doctor is shocked by this pronouncement and replies, “But you don’t believe in God.” To which Tarrou replies, “Exactly! Can one...
The Scientist & Jesus: Sharing the Devout Temper
William James once remarked that while scientists often possess no religious creed, their temper is devout. In other words, most scientists are deeply awed by the majesty of the universe. Thus they approach their work in a way that is earnest, patient, and humble before the face of the world’s grand complexity–regardless of whether or not they possess a religious faith. These days it often seems that only the scientist retains a devout temper. A coarsening of discourse and temperament has invaded not only our popular media and politics, but our workplaces and even, at times, our churches–with preachers letting their egos...
On the Road with Jack Kerouac – God is Pooh Bear
Towards the very end of Jack Kerouac’s classic novel On the Road, he writes several memorable lines, which he read famously on The Steve Allen Show in 1956. One passage is as follows: “In Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh-Bear?… The comment that God is Pooh-Bear has caused a lot of confusion over the years, with many people claiming that Kerouac thinks that God is a fiction. But to believe that Jack Kerouac felt that God was a figment of our imaginations is to terribly misread him....
Nothing New Under the Sun
In the world of Progressive Christianity and the SBNR (in its various forms), there seems to be a growing belief that we are on the cusp of a new age of spiritual enlightenment. This has engendered an enthusiasm much like in the 1960s, when the “spiritual but not religious” of that time thought they were ushering in the Age of Aquarius–a time when peace, love, and understanding would reign. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. The hippies of the 60s and early 70s quickly became the yuppies and capitalists of the 80s and 90s. All that talk about letting the sunshine in was well just talk. Many who grew up during that...
Jesus, Buddha, & Grammatolatry at St. Mary’s Brisbane
After talking about the Buddhist statue controversy at St. Mary’s South Brisbane, we were reminded of just how many similar teachings and attitudes exist between Jesus and Buddha. One of the most prominent behaviors which these two prophets share is that neither one wrote anything down. By today’s standards (where everyone seems to be writing about every triviality under the sun, and then sharing it with millions of online strangers) the idea of possessing profound wisdom but then not writing it down sounds absurd. Why in the world did Buddha and Jesus do that? After all, it certainly would have solved a lot of headaches and...
Did Jesus Have a Sense of Humor?
In our meditation on The Laughter of Christ, we talked about how Jesus must have had a great sense of humor. Finding examples of the Nazarene’s humor isn’t easy though when reading the Gospels. Some folks have pointed towards Jesus’s admonition that we shouldn’t worry about the speck in our brother’s eye when we have a beam in our own as one example. But that is a bit of a stretch. All things considered, Jesus the humorist wasn’t likely a joke teller or smug connoisseur of witty epigrams. He undoubtedly was a satirist: the wielder of that eclectic humor which, to this day, continues to be the most effective...
Praising Contradictions – Progressive Christian Writers
There is one thing that many scientists and orthodox Christians share: that is, a dislike of contradictions. That an electron can appear as either a particle or a wave is as disturbing to the scientist, as the mystical phrase You are God and not God is to the evangelical Baptist. Literal Bible readers take extraordinary flights of fancy to erase the many contradictions of the Good Book, or simply ignore them altogether. Even among Progressive Christian writers, contradictions are usually avoided while they try to build a logical edifice on which to hang their theological hats. But there is no inherent shame in contradictions. Contradictions...
The God Collision: Christopher Hitchens is Not an Atheist
Ever since professional provocateur Christopher Hitchens published God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything he has become the patron saint of 21st century atheism. But is Hitchens really an atheist? Here at LivingHour.org we’ve always suspected no; that Hitchen’s diatribes were directed toward simply the literal sects of religion and those who anthropomorphize God as an old man in the clouds, living in a gated community with pearly gates. Hitchens is currently starring in the new documentary Collision, with Pastor Douglas Wilson. Unfortunately, like most ‘religious’ experts who battle Hitchens, Wilson tries...
The Three Laughing Monks
In China, there is the legend of the three laughing monks. They are also today sometimes referred to as the three laughing saints (but of course in a very SBNR way). The monks only ever did one thing: on entering a new village, they would stand in the market place and start laughing. They would laugh with their whole being (mind, body, heart, and soul) and suddenly people would wake up to the Life and Kingdom of God that surrounded them. A crowd would soon gather and everyone would start laughing because of these three crazy monks. Eventually, the whole town would get involved and be alive to joy. Then the monks would shimmy on to another...
Jesus Laughing
The Dalai Lama of Tibet is said to have an extraordinary laugh, one that rises frequently and joyfully from deep within his body. This is something we don’t attribute to Jesus much: laughter. We get so caught up with Jesus’s end game and the “man of sorrows” image that we lose sight of how much fun he must have been to be around. After all, Jesus certainly wouldn’t have been welcomed to the dinner table of so many sinners and outcasts had he been a bore1. He kept telling his disciples to “be of good cheer,” and he wasn’t the kind of teacher to be all talk. Jesus must have been full of cheer...
Our Relationships With God
And the moon rose over an open field… So it goes in Simon & Garfunkel’s classic song “America”. These 8 simple words are perhaps the most eloquent turn of phrase in all popular music–and a lyric that should serve as a strong metaphor for Progressive Christians and all those who seek the pathway to God. When the moon is close the horizon, hovering just above the open fields or cityscapes, it appears incredibly large, as though we could almost touch it. Yet as it rises in the sky it becomes smaller and feels beyond our grasp. It all comes down to a matter of perspective. When the moon is closer to the horizon...
Who Goes to Hell & The Long Arc of The Moral Universe
President Barack Obama has many times hit the refrain that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. Obama has attributed the quote to Martin Luther King, who invoked the long arc of the moral universe in relationship to African-Americans’ struggles for equal rights. Martin Luther King though did not coin this phrase about the moral universe. He was quoting from the passionate Unitarian Minister, and 19th century progressive Christian, Theodore Parker, who once said: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I can calculate...
If You Meet Jesus On The Road, Kill Him
A famous old piece of Zen wisdom says: “If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” There are a couple of reasons why we are called to take Buddha out. The most commonly cited reason is that the prophet in the road is not really Buddha at all, but a figment of our imaginations–a psychological projection of the person we want Buddha to be. To approach the real Buddha we have to eliminate (kill) these projections. The other reason for killing Buddha in the road is that by doing so we drop our last crutch and begin walking our spiritual path with full freedom and independence. In other words, we kill Buddha in the road to...
Trust Your Inner Wisdom?
Trust your “inner wisdom” is a lot like Joseph Campbell’s dictum follow your bliss. It sounds good on the surface, but it can just as likely lead us away from the Christ within as lead us toward our divinity and life’s purpose. This is because wisdom is not planted inside us like a burning bush but a mustard seed–a seed which takes years of learning, living, and loving for it to bloom up with fire. The seed of our inner wisdom also demands that we dissipate the cloud cover of our egos which so often stunts its growth and blurs its message. Jesus’s wisdom, we are told, grew as he grew in years.1 It was...
Ethan Allen on God, Reason, Prayer, & Religion
In this final installment of our special series on the Founding Fathers and their thoughts on God, Religion, & the Divine, we move to farmer, politician, and guerilla revolutionary leader Ethan Allen, who perhaps is best known for leading the Green Mountain Boys (and other fighters) in their raid and capture Fort Ticonderoga, a strategic victory which severely hampered communication between the northern and southern units of the British army. Like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Ethan Allen might be best described as a Progressive Christian Deist who believed reason must take a paramount place in religious activity. The following...
The American Character
One of our relatively forgotten Founding Fathers is James Wilson, a signatory of The Declaration of Independence, a member of the Continental Congress, and among the first six Supreme Court justices chosen by President George Washington. One the most prominent lawyers of his time, Wilson is often credited as being the most learned of the Framers of the Constitution. James Wilson was also someone who fretted over the youth of America and strongly advocated teaching young children the principles of liberty, freedom, and justice which inspired the American Revolution. Wilson takes on the teacher’s role in the following passage (from...
George Washington & Spiritual Tyranny
As we begin the final week of our month-long series on the Founding Fathers, Spirituality, and Religion, we turn our attention to George Washington, the commander of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and of course the first President of The United States. A fierce advocate of personal liberties, General Washington worried over the tyranny of establishments and institutions in all matters, especially regarding politics and religion. As such, Washington belonged to no political party and in fact wished that America would not form parties, not simply out of a fear of tyrrany but also because he felt a party system would encourage...
James Madison on Religion & Teachers of Christianity
Today in our faith and religion series of The Founding Fathers, we take a look at James Madison, the 4th President of the United States, who is widely recognized as being the “Father of the Constitution.” Madison was a strong advocate of limited federal power, and a vigorous defender of the separation between Church and State. An Episcopalian, Madison always took a reasonable and measured approach to the subject of religion. Whether or not he might be described as a “deist” is open to debate, and, in the end, an inconsequential point. His bona fides as a Progressive Christian are unimpeachable. The following passage...
John Adams, Knowledge & The Character of Literary Men
One of the most influential Founding Fathers of the United States was John Adams, our second president and the revolutionary delegate who was instrumental in persuading Congress to adopt the United States’ Declaration of Independence in 1776. A Unitarian Progressive Christian, Adams was well familiar with the abuses to which Christianity was subject, yet he kept an abiding faith in religion’s positive role of uniting and morally guiding the American people. This does not mean though that Adams felt government should in any way be involved in religion. Like Jefferson, Franklin, and others, Adams was well aware how such involvement...
Thomas Jefferson on Jesus, Religion & Reason
This week in our special series on the Founding Fathers, we return to Thomas Jefferson, who likely wrote more on the subjects of God, Christianity, and Religion than any of the other Americans we attribute “founding father” status. Indeed Jefferson went so far as to famously write The Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, in an attempt to clear up many of the misconceptions he felt surrounded the Nazarene and were being promulgated by the Church. As such, Thomas Jefferson might genuinely be considered the Father of SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious) Progressive Christianity in America. The following...
William Penn’s Spiritual & Practical Advice to His Children
Before the likes of Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and Adams, we had William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania who is rightly considered by many to be America’s first Founding Father. A champion of religious freedom and democracy, Penn stands out among many early American settlers in his good relations and treaties with native-Americans. A Quaker (the Religious Society of Friends), William Penn was good friends with George Fox, the founder of the Quakers and like Fox, Penn combined a refined spiritual outlook with practical sensibilities. In the following passages,1 we find Penn offering sound advice to his children, as they begin...
Jesus’s Audacity of Acceptance (Not Hope)
The latest e-Bulletin from the Center for Progressive Christianity is titled “Why Do We Dare to Have Hope?“–a somewhat tepid title variation of Barack Obama’s well-known book The Audacity of Hope. In the newsletter we thus have articles dealing with the role of HOPE in the Progressive Christian path. We have President Fred Plumer talking about “hope” as an action of creative transformation, SBNR Pastor Ian Lawton arguing that being filled up with “hope” is a choice, and a book review about how “hope” brings beauty to the Christian journey. But as is so often the case when it comes...
Patrick Henry & The Great Christian Divide
Any series on the Founding Fathers and Christianity would be remiss without addressing the topic of slavery. For us today it seems amazing that such enlightened men, who demanded liberty and freedom for themselves, couldn’t see the hypocrisy in keeping slaves. But many of the Founding Fathers did clearly see the evil of the slave trade and bore no illusions as to themselves being masters over another race. For some perspective on this matter, we turn to Patrick Henry, the former governor of Virginia, who is famously remembered for his “Give me Liberty, or give me Death!” speech, which was a call to arms against the oppressive...
Progressive Christian Sermons
The state of Christian sermons (be they Evangelical sermons or Progressive Christian sermons) has remained pretty constant for centuries now. What state is this? Well, in the words of singer and songwriter Joe Jones (circa 1960): You talk too much, you worry me to death, You talk too much, you even worry my pet, You just talk, talk too much. You talk about people that you don’t know, You talk about people wherever you go, You just talk, talk too much. It is not so much that long-winded sermons cause us to worry (or nod off in the pews). Or that Christianity’s preachers talk too much about people they don’t know, even...