I usually regard quizzes that promise to categorize me in five minutes as too simplistic to be accurate, and therefore only complete them when bored. That said, in a recent bored moment, I took a “listening quiz in Rebecca Shafir’s book The Zen of Listening, and was taken aback by…

Contemplative prayer has been called “resting in God.” It’s a prayer, according to Friar Arico, of Contemplative Outreach,  of “interior silence, an experience of God’s presence as the ground in which our being is rooted, the Source from whom our life emerges at every moment.” Its beginnings Plato It began…

A Mennonite Family’s Grief I recently read an article entitled “A Radical Grief” by Jana Pruden. It describes a conversation with a man whose life had been ruined by his child’s murder. Because of it, a Mennonite family decided to forgive the man who had murdered their own child. Although…

I just a read short poem about tragedy called “New Year’s Eve” by Carl Dennis*. It begins by advising the reader to “reserve one evening a year for thinking about your double”– in the case of this poem, a driver who slams into a pedestrian on his way home, while…