The man who taught me yoga was lean and stringy—the very image of a traditional yogi, except for his greying mullet and tendency to sound like a Baptist preacher. But today his voice was soft as he led 70 would-be yoga teachers in one of our last exercises: getting over ourselves.
The writing scripts of humankind may look completely different from one another, but the sounds formed by human mouths can be very similar. For example, the sound Ma—and variations thereof—mean Mother all over the world.
J. Robert Oppenheimer said that when the first atomic bomb was detonated, he remembered a quote from the Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I have become Death, destroyer of worlds." That ancient sentiment was written in Sanskrit—not the oldest language of humankind, but one of the few which are still in use today.
Five days of silence…my friends laughed in astonishment. I’d signed up for a retreat at a Buddhist centre in the woods: no reading, no writing, no talking, no eye contact. My friends were amused (amazed?) because they were familiar with just how much I could talk. But maybe not with why.
I’ve always wanted to be consistent. Walk one path with loyal dedication. But it was not to be.
Born with a perverse need to be both sceptical and spiritual, I have a checkered religious history. I’ve been a Jehovah Witness, Anglican altar girl, and agnostic (a few times). Twenty years ago though, I found Paganism. Instead of dogma and moralizing, it offered me a celebration of life and a treasure trove of symbols and traditions to explore.
Imagine . . . warm garden soil pressing between your toes, a gentle breeze caressing your face, luscious fruits ripening on the vine, sparkling dew drops decorating a spider’s web
Connect . . . with all the ways that earth, air, fire, water show up to sustain your daily life and life on Earth
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...