Taken from a forum post and republished here:
So, I’ve been mulling this thing for over a week now, wondering how to go about expressing my gratitude to the man I married almost 13 years ago. I decided to do it here because: A) It’s my forum and I can and B) Most of the people [...]

Haven’t had a lot of time for this blog of late, but I did spy something today that I wanted to relay to anyone reading along.
Hat tip to The LA Times’ Religion section.
A lively debate over the Dead Sea Scrolls
As the ancient documents are readied for a San Diego exhibition, scholars clash over just who [...]

A review of Shahram Shiva’s Lovedrunk. In a phrase: Rumi served light and sensous over well-crafted Middle-Eastern grooves. Well worth adding to the soundtrack of your life.
Disclaimer: I’m not a professional reviewer. No one pays me to write this stuff. Metaphors For Life is an affiliate of CDBaby.com but not of the artist or label [...]

Spreading some good news about good music and good service from CDBaby.com.
It was a custom shopkeepers used to follow religiously when weighing or measuring quantities for their customers — they meted out the requested amount, then included a bit extra “for good measure.” It was considered “good business” because you just never knew, really, if [...]

Conservative Islamic family values, workplace ethics, and a fatwah only an academic could love.
After reading a story like today’s, I’m often left wondering if conservative religious leaders don’t get headaches from trying to find plausible work-arounds for the difficulties their repressive edicts cause. How can any society function when its moral leadership assumes that adult [...]

Or, how in the Mauldin case, there’s actually more than enough blame to go around.
I read this article on the Joshua Mauldin case this morning and was dumbfounded. Not because this stuff doesn’t happen all the time — it does, unfortunately. Not because I didn’t believe any of it could happen — of course it [...]

Or, how modern colleges and universities are finding ways to integrate interfaith dialogues into a post-modern curriculum.
Last November, the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA played host to “faculty, staff and administrators from 10 colleges and universities across the country” who gathered to discuss and develop their ideas about the integration of spirituality and [...]

After sober consideration, M4L&L has pulled the church sign graphic that was posted in response to news of Rev. Jerry Falwell’s death.
In retrospect, I have to agree that my disgust with the man’s ideals ought to die with him. By posting that image as I did, I was pouring salt in some fairly raw wounds [...]

With a farewell speech that contained searing attacks on capitalism, Marxism, birth control, sex, drugs and “lax morals,” Pope Benedict XVI has deeply underscored his church’s irrelevancy to Latin American Catholics and proved how out of touch he is with God’s movement in modern times.
By all accounts Joseph Ratzinger was and is a highly intelligent [...]

According to Australia’s ABC NewsOnline, [tag]His Holiness[/tag] the [tag]Dalai Lama[/tag] of [tag]Tibet[/tag] intends to semi-retire in the next few years, surrendering his political leadership to unnamed successors (”the elected leadership”) while retaining [tag]spiritual[/tag] leadership over [tag]Tibetan Buddhism[/tag].
Being recognized as the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama (and in turn, the reincarnated [tag]Buddha[/tag] of [tag]Compassion[/tag]) does [...]