Redefining Progressive Christianity, The Living Hour combines scripture, literature, philosophy, and science to rediscover a life of faith, reason, wonder, & joy.
Thomas Paine on Christianity & True Greatness
This week in our special series on the Founding Fathers, we begin with the revolutionary Thomas Paine, a statesman who often was ostracized for his SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious) views on Christianity, God, and religion. Like a true Progressive Christian, Paine tried to encourage forward progress in all aspects of the individual life and the life of the nation. His work The Rights of Man remains a testament to his enlightened perspective on the nature of public rights versus those of a government, while his famous pamphlet Common Sense reminds us still today, to our chagrin, how uncommon “common sense” truly...
John Dickinson, Divine Providence & Our Freedoms
In this installment of our series dealing with the Founding Fathers–thoughts on Religion, God, and Progressive Christian living, we turn to John Dickinson, a less widely-known Father from Philadelphia who fought during the American Revolution and served as a Pennsylvania delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774 and the U.S. Constitutional Convention of 1787. Dickinson is perhaps most famous for his declaration to King George III that Americans were resolved to die free men rather than live slaves. The following passage is taken from John Dickinson’s “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of...
Benjamin Franklin’s Religion & Jesus of Nazareth
Continuing with The Living Hour’s month-long series on the Founding Fathers’ reflections on God, Christianity, and Religion, we move today to some commentary from that SBNR Progressive Christian Benjamin Franklin. The following passage is taken from a letter Franklin wrote to the reverend Ezra Stile in 1790, when Franklin was 84 years old, and Stile was serving as president of Yale College. Here we find Franklin discussing his perspectives on religion and the significance of Jesus of Nazareth. Considering Franklin is 84, it is especially interesting to note his statement that this is the first time he has been questioned about...
The Founding Fathers On Christianity, God, & Religion
Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States could be best described as SBNR (Spiritual But Not Religious) Progressive Christians. We at The Living Hour often look back to them for inspiration, for they were leaders who possessed a solid sense of reason that was backed by an understanding of the divine nature of creation and their place in it. As such, they strongly demonstrated all the characteristics of the truly progressive Christian. Therefore for the next month, our SBNR Motivational series will be featuring passages from Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, John Adams, and other early Americans, on the subjects...
The End of Progressive Christianity?
Lately there has been a lot of talk about a “crisis” in Progressive Christianity and whether or not the Progressive Christian movement is dead in the water. Critics claim that new seminary graduates are ill-prepared to lead today’s generation and that new “paradigms” need to be developed. Some progressive ministers are even abandoning the Christian cloak altogether to become “independent” spiritual leaders. One can’t help either being amused or depressed by all the talk, for it relates little to the kind of Christianity that Jesus taught. The beauty of Jesus’s Christianity is that it...
Kahlil Gibran & The Ass Loaded With Books of Wisdom
The Lebanese-American writer Kahlil Gibran is best known for his elegant and moving book The Prophet. But Gibran produced many other works during his short life, which ended in 1931. Since his death, Gibran has inspired countless spiritual progressives, including artists like John Lennon who paraphrased Gibran’s famous verse, “Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it so that the other half may reach you,” in the Beatle’s song Julia, from the White Album. In A Second Treasury of Kahlil Gibran there is one passage that is especially poignant and should be recalled frequently by Progressive Christians and all...
Death & The Tao
Spiritual Progressives who have studied some Eastern philosophy are no doubt familiar with Lao Tzu, whose book the Tao Te Ching (The Way of Nature & Its Power) established the religion of Taoism. Not so many though are familiar with the second great teacher of Taoism, Chuang Tzu, who more than anyone preserved Taoism from the encroachments of Confucianism. One of the most memorable stories about Chuang Tzu surrounds the death of his wife, and now follows. After Chuang Tzu’s wife died, his friend Hui Tzu went to his house to console him. When he got there, he found Chuang Tzu sitting on the ground, banging on a drum, and singing...
The Moral Effort
In our last motivational, we quoted the progressive Christian Leo Tolstoy as saying that we all can wake up to a real, happy, and peaceful life, as it exists in our consciences (God’s Kingdom within), if we just make the moral effort. That was easy for him to say. While Tolstoy might have inspired Martin Luther King and Gandhi with such words, few of us think we are capable of the moral effort of a Gandhi or MLK. Can’t we all just slide into Heaven by just accepting Jesus Christ as our savior? Well, that would be nice. But as we talk about in The Lord’s Prayer for Daily Life, Jesus never preached that kind lesson. He told...
Leo Tolstoy & The Kingdom of God is Within You
The great Russian author Leo Tolstoy is a monumental figure in the world of literature. His epic novel War and Peace is unrivaled in its breadth and scope. But Tolstoy was more than just a fiction writer. He was a keen observer of the human condition and arguably the most progressive Christian in Russia during the 19th and early 20th century. His later writings on the Christian faith influenced spiritual progressives in the both the West and the East, including famous figures such as Martin Luther King and Gandhi. Leo Tolstoy’s most influential work on Progressive Christian faith is The Kingdom of God is Within You. The following...
The Evolution of God: Robert Wright’s Salon.com Interview
In today’s online issue of Salon.com there is an interesting interview with Robert Wright, a well-known American journalist. Wright is the author of a new book “The Evolution of God,” which approaches its subject from the logical standpoint that, more often than not, we have created our Gods to match our own evolving self-image and needs. Wright refers to himself as a materialist in that he thinks that the answers to religious questions, including the evolution of God, lie in the facts on the ground. All good so far. But a problem arises in how Wright discerns what is fact, and what he chooses to include and not include...
Immortality & The Evolution of Christianity & Religion
Continuing with our theme of cultural evolution and the long arc of the moral universe, we turn to the subject of the evolution of Christianity, Religion, and Christian thought. For insight we go to another progressive figure who long has been forgotten by many: British historian Henry Thomas Buckle, who arguably was the first scientific analyzer of social evolution. Like the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, Buckle is an individual who Progressive Christianity can look toward in re-discovering its heritage. The following passage on immortality comes from The Essays of Henry Thomas Buckle circa 1863 (unlikely to be found at your local...
The Progressive Christian: A Working Definition
Readers of LivingHour.org have noticed that we cast a pretty wide net when talking about Progressive Christianity and the works of Progressive Christians. In our online bookstore, our motivational series, and our video picks we include people who’ve never identified themselves as Christians, much less Progressive Christians. Indeed we’ve even included atheists, like Albert Camus, among our sources of Progressive Christian inspiration. Although our definition of a Progressive Christian may seem a little loose, it is by no means vague. At The Living Hour we see the writers, scientists, philosophers, and preachers that we’ve...
Peace, My Brother!
One thing that hippies, new agers, and evangelical Christians have in common is that they often are easy targets to make fun of. All their talk about peace, love, vibrations, Jesus, and the Lord (day in and day out) gets tiring and weirds more than a few people out. It makes many folks feel as though it all issues from an overwhelming sense of doubt; like these groups are trying to convince themselves that this stuff really exists. One also feels some pity for the language itself, because when certain words are repeated over and over again their meanings become blurry and descend into gobbledygook. You know what I mean, kind sister. You...
The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
The wolf in sheep’s clothing is a favorite metaphor of the conservative Christian establishment in the United States. For centuries now they’ve used it whenever confronted by folks driven by compassion, love, and everything Jesus encapsulates so perfectly in The Lord’s Prayer, but who don’t subscribe to their own world view. It’s no wonder then that the wolves in sheeps’ clothing warning is trotted out increasingly by the Christian right these days, as Progressive Christianity secures a stronger foothold in American society. All of this talk about wolves can be traced back to the Gospel of Matthew (7:15-16),...
Jesus’s Satori Experience
When the Zen scholar Daisetz (D.T.) Suzuki was asked what it was like to have satori, he said: “Well, it’s like ordinary, everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.” This kind of experience isn’t something we usually associate with Jesus of Nazareth, a prophet with his feet firmly rooted to the ground on which we walk, and who we like to see as fully wise, not needing any satori of sudden enlightenment. But there is another translation of satori, and that is “a kick in the eye.” It is this kind of satori that Jesus experiences in the Gospel story. It occurs when he finds his trusty...
Evolution vs. Creationism
President Barak Obama has wisely suggested that it is time to take the heat out of the debate over abortion, and that people on both sides of the aisle (pro-life vs. pro-choice) need to stop demonizing each other and try to find some common ground that they can agree upon. Obama’s counsel might also be applied to the debate over “where we come from”. Public debate is usually driven by the more strident supporters of both sides of an issue; this is especially true in the debate over the theory of evolution vs. creationism (or intelligent design). The result is that both sides come off badly. Creationists who see evolutionists...
Life is a Boiling Up
The 14th century German vicar Meister Eckhart was in many ways a 21st century Progressive Christian. Although highly educated and an admirer of Thomas Aquinus, Eckhart also realized the limits of formal education, once telling the Paris elite that not one person among them could conceive with all their learning what God was in the meanest creature, not even in a fly. An indomitable spirit, with seemingly limitless energy and passion, Meister Eckhart’s entire life can be seen as a personification of his realization of the living God. Eckhart wrote: Life is a boiling up and pouring out of itself, scalding and melting and bubbling within...
Happiness: Brando & Money
Vanity Fair recently issued a press release on its new interview with actor Johnny Depp. By association Depp aligns himself with the likes of Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Hunter S. Thompson, and especially Marlon Brando, who (like Depp) once owned an island. One thing that celebrities share with regular folks is that we all like to associate ourselves with people whom we admire, and fancy the notion that we’re a little like them. Yet in reality we often are not like our idols. We often display neither the courage nor the insight of those who have become our icons–for if we did, we would turn our attention away from them and turn...
Jesus, Graham Greene, & Ways of Escape
The Catholic writer Graham Greene famously summed up his life as a search for “Ways of Escape.” He said that his abundant writing and travels were simply a means to escape the panic fear, madness, and melancholia of contemporary life. Green’s life summation goes a long way in helping to explain some events found in the canonical Gospels of Jesus the Christ. It often strikes the objective reader as odd that the future disciples drop everything on a dime when the stranger named Jesus comes walking along and says “follow me.”1 But is it really that strange? As Thoreau said, the majority of us do live lives of...
Your Personal Legend?
In our SBNR motivational about William Blake and seeing Heaven in a Wildflower, we talked about the transcendent personality of Jesus Christ and how that should be one of our goals as Progressive Christians (or as Sons and Daughters of God, regardless of our religious persuasion). Some readers have interpreted this motivational to imply that we advocate the building of personal legends ala Paulo Coelho. Nothing could be further from our intent. Legends are by their very nature simplistic but fanciful variations of the genuine life–which is littered with multiple twists and turns, failures and triumphs, and punctuated by long bouts...
How to Teach The Lord’s Prayer to Children
The book The Lords Prayer for Daily Life was written in a way that we hope appeals to both teens and adults, each group of readers being able to take certain lessons from it, or simply food for further thought. But what about the child? The Lord’s Prayer is the kind of prayer that children can learn at a young age, and it far surpasses that old standard: Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake; I pray the Lord my soul to take–a prayer which makes children think that the Grim Reaper is going to descend upon them in their sleep. To assist Progressive Christian parents we’ve...
Why Progressive Christianity?
In the latest e-bulletin from The Center for Progressive Christianity, President Fred Plumer includes some letters sent by readers. One writer says that the members of his liberal community have “long ago opted out of the Christian cultural-linguistic game altogether and have become either Epicurean Gourmands, Secular Humanists, Process New Thought, Global Mystics, Unitarian Universalists, or else they define themselves as Unaffiliated Life-Long Learners and Spiritual Seekers who have turned from organized religion to an integral cultural creative lifestyle that synthesizes an interest in spirituality, philosophy, literature, history,...
Jesus & The Wiz
On reading that Broadway was reproducing the classic 1970s musical The Wiz, we were reminded of one of its most memorable songs, Ease on Down the Road, sung by a spirited Diana Ross (Dorothy) and Michael Jackson (Scarecrow) while on their way to see The Wiz (Richard Pryor). The song tells us don’t you carry nothing that might be a load, come on, ease on down, ease on down the road. For Progressive Christians called by Jesus to repeatedly lay down our lives for others1, this is good advice. We are not asked to carry the burdens of others, but to lift up the fallen. Jesus teaches this in the parable of the Good Samaritan. The charitable...
SBNR Progressive Christianity
Since starting LivingHour.org, we have received some wonderful letters from Progressive Christians. This feedback has shown us how truly diverse the “progressive” Christian community is. Some folks have wondered why we still choose to identify ourselves as “Christians”; while others question our focus on Jesus Christ. A few progressive readers have taken exception with the “authority” we take on The Lord’s Prayer. After all, no one knows for sure whether Jesus of Nazareth even existed, so who are we to say what Jesus “wanted” us to believe? Good questions all. And we could write long...
The Caduceus & God’s Longissima Via
How do I find God? If God does exist, what path should I take to his doorstep? What road less traveled should I shimmy down? We can look for answers in the Bible, the Gnostic Gospels, the Koran, the Tao Te Ching, and other religious texts. Or we can look toward symbols to discover the nature of God, our divinity, and life on earth. One ancient symbol that is rich with meaning is the caduceus. The caduceus is a staff entwined by two serpents in the form of a double helix–a form which today often refers to the structure of DNA. In Greek mythology, the caduceus was wielded by Isis, the messenger of the Gods. It was Isis who linked the...
Talking of Eternal Things
In St. Pauls second Epistle to the Corinthians, he tells the community to remember that “the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.” When this idea is delivered from the pulpit of Christian churches today, preachers usually discuss how it refers to God’s grace, the Holy Spirit, or the kingdom of Heaven. The problem is that we tend to think of all these things as God’s alone or God’s gifts to us. They come from the outside and thus we don’t consider ourselves as co-creators of eternal things, along with the Father. But as Sons and Daughters of God, we are all...
Common Sense Christianity
The old saying “there is nothing common about common sense” has never rung so true as it does today. We live in a course and relativist age where the noble drive for fairness and balance has been misdirected toward conflating opinions with facts, and where common sense lies buried beneath a rubble of truthiness. That being the case, it might be a good idea to return to the writer of Common Sense, Thomas Paine, for a little refresher on reasonable thinking. Wrongly accused of atheism by the orthodox Christians of his time (and, later on, a strident Teddy Roosevelt), Thomas Paine is among the many American figures who form the...
For the Sake of God
The Gulistan (Rose Garden) is the masterwork of 13th century Persian writer Sa’di (Saadi), a celebrated poet who recently was quoted by President Barack Obama in his 2009 address to the people of Iran. In the Gulistan, Saadi tells a story that goes like this: A person with a harsh voice was reciting loudly the Koran. A good and holy man went up to him and asked, “How much are you getting paid for that?” The person answered, “Nothing.” “If that is so,” asked the other, “why give yourself so much trouble?” He answered, “I am reading for the sake of God!” The good and holy...
The Test of Freedom
The writer and wandering traveler Isabelle Eberhardt was an extraordinary woman. The remains of her book Dans l’Ombre Chaude de l’Islam – In the Hot Shade of Islam (salvaged from a flash flood that killed the young author) was once called “one of the strangest human documents that a woman has given to the world.” In her early twenties, Eberhardt wrote the following: Vagrancy is deliverance and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick...
Jesus, Dostoevsky & The Grand Inquisitor
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s parable of The Grand Inquisitor, Jesus reappears on Earth during the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Although the crowds adore him, he is promptly thrown in prison and sentenced to death. While in his cell, Jesus is visited by the Grand Inquisitor who says that he must kill him, even though he knows that he is truly Jesus Christ. The Inquisitor defends Jesus’s death sentence because: Instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of people at rest for ever, you chose all that is exceptional, vague and enigmatic; you chose what was utterly beyond the strength of others, acting as though...