A Startling Vision for the 21st Century Church
By Tom Thresher

Tom Thresher makes a powerful argument for a new kind of Christianity that transcends Christianity as we know it today. A fascinating discussion that may and open your eyes to a new vision of Christianity, even startling! 

Jesus Through the Eyes of Rumi, a Sufi Mystic
By Ian Lawton

Occasionally throughout history, someone comes along and moves a religion from being a pond religion to an ocean religion.  Someone comes onto the scene and blows the lid off the top of religion, reforming it, transforming it.  Jesus was one such figure.

Jesus and Mohammed
By Jim Burklo
In the year 610, a merchant named Mohammed left his home in Mecca and went up to a desert mountain called Hira and sat in a cave to meditate.  There he experienced the first of a series of revelations given to him by the Angel Gabriel, the same angel who came to Mary, Jesus’ mother, six centuries before.  Just as Jesus went to the desert to meditate at the start of his mission, and was visited by angels, Mohammed’s spiritual journey began in the same way. 
This was no accident, because Mohammed was familiar with Christianity and with Judaism.  However, his knowledge of those faiths came to him third-hand.  He heard a jumble of stories from the Bible, alternate versions of these stories, and folk traditions about them that had been filtered through multiple cultures.
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Jesus and Krishna
By Jim Burklo
One thing to remember is that there is virtually no basis for the historical reality of anybody named Krishna.  Hindus generally could care less when or if he was ever born as a real person.  They are much more comfortable with accepting their religious figures as mythical than are a lot of Christians who want to believe in Jesus’ historical reality.  Christians could learn from the bhakti yoga of India, and lighten up about expecting people to take the Bible literally.  What matters is the experience of deep bonding and the sometimes ecstatic experience of devotion itself.  Falling in love with Jesus or with Krishna can usher the bhakti yogi into the presence of the love that is the source and goal of the universe. ...
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Murder on the Subcontinent
By Eboo Patel

Washington Post, On Faith. The essence of India is pluralism, the idea of different communities retaining their uniqueness while relating in a way that recognizes they share universal values. More than two thousand years ago, the Indian emperor Ashoka, a Buddhist, said, "Other sects should be duly honored in every way on all occasions." The great poet and contemporary of Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, wrote, that the "idea of India" itself militates "against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one's own people from others."

The Christian Pluralist

When Southport United Methodist Church in Indianapolis began promoting The Purpose Driven Life, two men in the pews discovered a purpose for themselves that Rick Warren didn’t recommend. Warren’s facile certitude about faith did not ring true with their own experience and understanding. So they took matters into their own hands and wrote a book that offered an alternative perspective on Christianity.

You Don't Have to be Wrong for Me to be Right, Finding Faith Without Fanaticism
By Brad Hirschfield
Grounded in biblical scholarship and interwoven with personal stories, You Don't Have to Be Wrong for Me to Be Right provides a pragmatic path to peace, understanding, and hope that appeals to the common wisdom of all religions....
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Jesus: The Way That is Open to Other Ways
By Paul Knitter
I am one of those Christians whose faith has been uncomfortably challenged by a reality that has been with us since the dawning of humanity but has become even clearer and more pressing over the last century: that there are many ways to be religious. There are many religions; there always have been; and, despite two millennia of Christian missionary work, it sure seems like there always will be. The manyness, the diversity, of religions is here to stay....
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Soul Sunday
Because my husband is Jewish, and I, Christian, we have a special need to explain both our faiths and to help our children develop their own personal identities. One day we hope they are able to find answers to spiritual questions and create a path to God on their own. Soul Sunday grew out of the need to bring us together, as a family, to talk and understand, and to explore our faith. We wanted to create a specific time for questions, discussion, and voicing concerns.  The results have been enormously rewarding, as each child has learned about faith, and also about the diversity of the world. Best of all, they have become more self-confident, introspective, and compassionate individuals....
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POST DENOMINATIONAL HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS
Change is in the air and the deep rooted change of mind required of us in the present global stress challenges us all to set our own lives in the big picture.......Here is an attempt to make word picture of the mindshift required. I
wonder if it would stir creative thoughts among tcpc participants....
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Prayer Given by the Right Reverend V. Gene Robinson at the Opening Inaugural Event
As many of you know, the Right Rev. Gene Robinson, the openly Gay Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire , gave the opening prayer at yesterday's Lincoln Memorial event. It was the first event in the inaugural festivities this year. HBO, which had paid for exclusive rights to the event chose not to broadcast Bishop Robinson's prayer. So if you watched there you wouldn't have caught it or even known that it occurred. NPR didn't air it either. There's no record of it in images placed on the sites of Getty Images, New York Times and the Washington Post. It's a complete erasure of his ever having delivered the prayer.  Such is the continuing policy of silence and erasure we have to live with from people who should know better. We are used to this. If you know your Gay history this has happened again and again. In fact this little list-serve is really about recovering the truth in our history and celebrating it. So we're going to celebrate it by providing here the full text of Bishop Robinson's prayer....
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Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, The Psychiatrist of Christianity
By Don Murray
The voice I miss in contemporary theological discourse is that of Dr. Carl Gustav Jung.Carl Jung has been called the psychiatrist of Christianity. It is as if he put Christianity on the couch and worked through to an authentic Christian reality that lays a foundation for a whole new understanding of religions in general and Christianity in particular. In the process he became one of the major influences in changing the way the western world thinks. In fact, for me, the two greatest minds of the western world in the twentieth century were Dr. Albert Einstein, who introduced a new understanding of the outer world (the universe) and Dr. Carl Jung, who created a pathway or map into the inner world of the collective unconscious or
objective psyche....
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Remarks of President Barak Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast

But no matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate. There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know.

The Phoenix Affirmations Full version
Phoenix Affirmations full version from CrossWalk America...
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From the Third Floor of the Gargage- The Story of TheOOZE
By Spencer Burke
I used to be a pastor. More than that, I was a pastor at Mariners Church in Irvine, California-a bona fide mega church with a 25-acre property and a $7.8 million dollar budget.  For years, I played by the rules and tried hard not to think too much about the lingering questions in my soul. Doubt, after all, was dangerous. Who knew where it might lead?...
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Confessions of a Cowboy Christian and Practicing Buddhist
Beyond miles and miles of Sonoran and Chihuahuan desert
Criss-crossing the Southwest and Northern Mexico,
Where local folks know how to stand "tall in the saddle" as they say
Across a landscape that seems to go nigh on to forever
Even beyond the Boundlessness of you, O' God,
Here imaginations may touch the beauty of all creation
And horizons meet the very edge of eternity....
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Jesus and Buddha-Kindred Spirits
By Ian Lawton

That is the core truth of Buddhism. We expect things to go well, and when they don’t, we suffer. The truth of Buddhism is that when we drop our desire for life to be different than what it is, at least a lot of our suffering will disappear as well. Drop the attachments, and the suffering will be dropped as well. That’s the way to enlightenment in Buddhism. You hear in the core teachings of Buddhism the bringing together of laughter and suffering, laughter as an image for accepting everything as it is, as perfect just now, and sorrow as an image for wanting it to be more hopeful.

We hold those two things in balance all the time, and I believe the same is true in Christianity. Christianity also is an attempt to hold together laughing and sorrow. I want to suggest that as we move toward Easter that we might see this journey as that balance. You can’t have Good Friday without Easter Sunday. You can’t have Easter Sunday without Good Friday. Christianity at its essence brings together suffering and laughter.

Always A Seeker
By Fred Plumer
Certainly the most influential and helpful reading I had done over the years was in the various Buddhist traditions. It is true that on the surface there are significant differences from the teachings of Jesus and the Buddha. And it seems important to note that the historical Jesus had only three or four years to formulate and articulate his teachings, while the Buddha's teachings evolved over several decades. And certainly these two great teachers were coming out of very different cultures and social settings....
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Mind In The Balance-Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity
By B. Alan Wallace
By establishing a dialogue in which the meditative practices of Buddhism and Christianity speak to the theories of modern philosophy and science, B. Alan Wallace reveals the theoretical similarities underlying these disparate disciplines and their unified approach to making sense of the objective world.  "This work is replete with lucid argument and wonderful, (nearly breathtaking) detailed explanation as to the congruencies and parallels between Eastern & Western contemplative traditions and modern, that is to say: quantum physics. Mind in the Balance is now in my top three favorites of all time, easily a must read 5 plus star effort," reviews Matthew J. Schimpf.

Environment in Relgion

From: http://www.religioustolerance.org/envreligion.htm    Destruction of nature, whether quick and immediate, like the slash-and-burn agricultural practices, or gradual, such as the destruction of the ozone layer, dulls our sensitivity to the presence of God in the natural world. Religions need to get involved with the development of a more comprehensive worldview and ethics to assist in reversing this trend. Such ideas have been accepted, but apparently without much effect.

Dimensions of Faith
By: Philip Sudworth.  Considers the different dimensions of faith and the implications for how we respond to the faith of others....
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Are Labels really Necessary?
By Joseph Mattioli

This short article was written as a post on the TCPC forum by Derek Ward who goes by the name Tariki on our discussion board concerning labels.

Interspirituality
By Jim Burklo

Here at the University of Southern California, part of my job as Associate Dean of Religious Life is to staff the student Interfaith Council.  This group of 15-20 students from many different religious backgrounds gathers every week for an evening of discussion over dinner.  The students share about their faith traditions and spiritual journeys, and with fascination learn a great deal from each other.  For the past two meetings, for instance, they have been playing their favorite spiritual music to each other on their computers and phones.  We’ve listened to black spirituals, Coptic Easter anthems, Arabic Muslim and Indian Sikh chants, and rock tunes in which students find soulful inspiration.

What is Interfaith?

By Rev. Maurisa Brown-Latham.  It is truly a blessing and honor to be able to share with everyone present today the meaning of a word that carries such power and potential to enhance and elevate our lives. A word that many people have struggled, over the course of our human existence, to define and invite into their personal space. This mysterious yet profound word has gone by various names over the centuries, but in our era it is commonly known amongst spiritual seekers and masters alike as "Interfaith".

Praying A New Story
By Michael Morwood

In this invigorating, poetic and imaginative paperback, Morwood shares prayers that can be used in small groups that reflect a fresh and bold reframing of Christian views of God, the universe, Jesus, the Spirit, and holidays such as Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, and Pentecost. Here you will read about an everywhere God instead of an elsewhere God, who is present and active in every corner of the universe and in every dimension of our everyday life.

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