What if the majority of the world’s 8 billion people could share in a season of spiritual grounding?  What if over half of humanity would focus, all at the same time, on the practices that lead to harmony within oneself and justice in society?  Well… The Muslim month of Ramadan began on Sunday.  Because the Islamic calendar is based on lunar cycles, Ramadan slowly migrates within our solar calendar, appearing a little earlier each year.  We’re in a window of years when it overlaps with our Christian observation of Lent.  Both Ramadan and Lent contain calls for searching one’s heart, doing good deeds, and recalling the core narrative and principles of one’s faith.  There are nearly two billion Muslims in the world, and about 2.4 billion Christians.  Faith in Public Life, which has developed a strong interfaith network in Central Ohio, recently shared these words from Azka Mahmood, an Islamic

I recently finished the book Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age by Katherine May. The title jumped out at me because my interests around creativity and spiritual formation leave me intrigued at the idea of “awakening wonder.” What’s more, the term “enchantment” is one way that I think we talk about experiences of transcendence. Even though the author is not writing from any specific religious tradition, she talks about various experiences of enchantment through the lens of spirituality and, on occasion, muses through issues of theology. Here is how she defines enchantment: “Enchantment is small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory…It is the sense that we are joined together in one continuous thread of existence with the elements constituting this earth, and that there is a potency trapped in this interconnection, a tingle on the border of our perception…[Enchantment is] the ability

The subject line comes from a presentation I heard last Thursday: “Professional Mourners, Grieving Mothers, and the Divine Politics of Lament.”  This was part of the annual two-day Schooler Institute at Methodist Theological School in Ohio (MTSO).  The speaker was CMCer Dr. Ryan Schellenberg.     Some things I’m stilling pondering: The practice of lament is woven throughout our scriptures.  There are Psalms of lament, stories of lament, and an entire book bearing the name Lamentations responding to the devastating loss of Jerusalem and its temple in Babylonian times.  Many traditional cultures consider lament an essential enough act as to hire professional mourners at funerals.  Most of us Westerners think it odd or even inauthentic to pay someone to lead us in the collective falling apart that is grief.  However, we’re more than willing to pay professionals for one-on-one sessions to help us individually hold it together.  Public lament has been