Books about scripture could fill a staggering number of shelves. Each offers an interpretation of words already interpreted by someone else. The texts are ancient. The explanations keep arriving. Apparently, the final word needs another edition. Every generation brings its discoveries, assumptions, and blind spots. We inherit scripture wrapped in centuries of commentary. Eventually, the…

We all build boxes to make life understandable. Religion supplies some. Education adds others. We assemble a few ourselves. They help us navigate the world. Trouble begins when we expect the whole universe to fit inside them. Apparently, reality did not read the packing instructions. Religion can become a “closed explanatory system.” Everything has an…

I have a fascination with ideas that may never offer certainty. The Divine is the most compelling of them. I keep returning to questions I cannot settle, drawn by the possibility that there is more to existence than I presently understand. Yet sometimes I wonder what, exactly, I am doing in this search. Much of…

I have spent a great deal of time thinking about God. Reading, questioning, revisiting what I was taught, and wondering how much of it I actually understood. Those pursuits have been valuable. But I am coming to appreciate that understanding the Divine also requires something quieter: time to be present, to pray, and to listen…

From Myth to Meaning to Maturity — Enlightenment 2.0 as the Next Turn of the Stream If ancient religion was born as an experience story, and Christianity emerged as a convergence of stories, then what can be called Enlightenment 2.0 is neither rebellion nor rejection. It is continual development. The stream did not dry up.…

It is – or is it – possible that our universe—and certainly our planet—exists within a reality vastly greater than anything our senses can perceive or our present instruments can measure. Whether that greater reality consists of bubble universes, multiple dimensions, an underlying field of consciousness, or something we have not yet imagined remains unknown.…

History is an interesting study in perspective. It began largely as oral memory—stories shaped and repeated so a community could preserve the people, events, warnings, and values it considered important. These accounts were not documentaries in the modern sense. Their purpose was less to record every detail exactly as it occurred than to carry meaning…

What we continually give our attention to eventually becomes a preoccupation. Attention is never entirely passive. Whatever we repeatedly watch, rehearse, fear, desire, or resent begins to occupy more real estate within us. It shapes our thoughts, stirs our emotions, and quietly influences how we interpret everything else. What begins as a point of focus…

Certainty can feel like solid ground, but it may become the very ground in which growth can no longer take root. Once a person decides that a belief is beyond question, curiosity begins to fade. The search ends—not necessarily because truth has been found, but because uncertainty has become too uncomfortable. Certainty can then become…

Life is hard. There is no honest way around that. We encounter disappointment, loss, uncertainty, difficult people, and circumstances we never would have chosen. Yet the experience itself is only part of what we carry. We also carry the emotional meaning we give it—the way we package it within ourselves. The same hardship can be…