America’s freedom of religion, and freedom from religion, offers every wisdom tradition an opportunity to address our soul-deep needs: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, secular humanism, agnosticism and atheism among others.
Category Archive: Parker Palmer
Political civility is not about being polite to each other. It’s about reclaiming the power of ‘We the People’ to come together, debate the common good and call American democracy back to its highest values amid our differences.
Movements begin when oppressed people make – and keep remaking – a deeply inward decision to stop consenting to external demands that contradict a critical inner truth, the truth that they are worthy of respect.
We have been deformed by educational and religious institutions that treat us as members of an audience instead of actors in a drama, so we become adults who treat democracy as a spectator sport.
Even when life challenges us, it’s a gift beyond all measure.
We are a profoundly interconnected species, as the global economic and ecological crises reveal in vivid and frightening detail. We must embrace the simple fact that we are dependent on and accountable to one another.
Every religious tradition is rooted in mysteries I don’t pretend to understand, including claims about what happens after we die. But this I know for sure: as long as we’re alive, choosing resurrection is always worth the risk.
Whatever America’s founders believed about Christianity – and they believed a wide range of things – they clearly rejected the idea of an established church.
I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.
I think there’s a lot of anesthesia being – that’s been pumped into American culture, the mass media television, various forms of entertainment, and the illusion of wealth that we now understand to be an illusion as well as the illusion that America is a world power.