KtBlog

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Return, Reimagine, Ritualize, Rebel: How has 2020 changed your spiritual life?

KtB is inviting submissions about how the events of this year have impacted your spiritual life.

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All in the Interfaith Family

Susan Katz Miller talks about “how to be the most joyful and creative and successful interfaith family you can be, whatever that looks like.”

Brianna Sacks

Taking the Easy Way

American perfectionism, meet meditation.

LivingWithAWildGod

“It’s The World That’s Strange”

Barbara Ehrenreich talks to Jeff Sharlet about her new book, mysticism, secrecy, and science.

Killing the Buddha

The Praying Habit: Quaker Week!

My first encounter with the Religious Society of Friends was in history class. They’d usually crop up twice: once when we were leading up to the American Revolution (Pennsylvania was named for William Penn) and another time when the Civil War was discussed (many abolitionist leaders were Quaker). They sounded like a pretty great group…

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Big Bang Fingerprints

We all leave our traces. Even campers who fastidiously carry their garbage out of the woods leave footprints behind. Flora and fauna from millions of years ago are found fossilized in the sand. The universe leaves traces behind, too. On March 17, scientists announced that the Big Bang, the universe-creating explosion, left its own traces…

Gary Austin (bottom row) at work, improvising.

Gary Austin: Making Surprising Sense

A Conversation with Gary Austin

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Spiritual American Trash

Buddha-killer and regular contributor Greg Bottoms has a new book out! It is a collection of eight biographical essays on 20th-century religious self-taught artists called Spiritual American Trash: Portraits from the Margins of Art and Faith (Counterpoint). It’s filled with his trademark poetic prose and insights on spirituality, creativity, suffering, and art-as-survival, and several of…

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Serendipity

Finding words for the ways things happen to one while traveling.

Killing the Buddha

Following the Gospel of George

In talking about his new documentary George Harrison: Living in the Material World, director Martin Scorsese reflected on his personal encounter with George Harrison’s music: “I will never forget the first time I heard ‘All Things Must Pass,’ the overwhelming feeling of taking in that all glorious music for the first time. It was like walking into…

Frequencies

Tune in to Frequencies!

Everyone talks about “spirituality,” but less often is it especially clear what we (or they) actually mean. That’s why, together with The Immanent Frame and the historians of religion Kathryn Lofton and John Lardas Modern, Killing the Buddha has been quietly working since the beginning of the year to develop Frequencies, a new online “collaborative genealogy…

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There Is No Abstention from Politics

Yesterday the folks over at The Guardian‘s Belief section asked me to weigh in on their question of the week, and for better or worse I sacrificed most of the day’s opportunity for book-writing on the altar of Welcome Distraction. The question is: “Can religion be apolitical?” What they have in mind, being British and…

Killing the Buddha

Beyond Belief

We received a letter first thing this morning regarding Nathan‘s new article in the Boston Globe. To Nathan Schneider: Your commentary, “Beyond Belief” in today’s Boston Sunday Globe caught my attention.  I read it with interest. Seminary was a late-in-life experience for me, my responding to a profound and undeniable spiritual “Call”. Ordained as a…

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Resisting the Invitation

So you’ve asked Christ into your heart… What if he has other plans?

"Morning's Glory," by Heather Longprè

The Unbearable Lightness of Seeking

In Allegra Goodman’s new novel, a hair-to-her-hips camp counselor gets religion, but never really gets it.