Many of us have mixed feelings about Occupy Wall Street. I personally get excited at any signs of life in America’s normally apathetic citizenry, but have been confused and maybe a bit turned off by the festival atmosphere and the initial incoherence of the movement and its participants. We expect sound bytes: where’s the political [...]

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This is a guest post from CatGirl. It’s a write up of her experience so far at the FCNL Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. I plan on writing up something later–maybe Monday. She’s much more on the ball than I am! You can follow my twitter feed, as I try to tweet the conference. Without [...]

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Because I’m focusing on NaNoWriMo and writing 50,000 words of fiction this month, I thought I’d pull up a few posts from the archives. This particular post was written about 3.5 years ago and was part of my OC Pilgrimage series, where I attended various churches and visited religious sites in Orange County and reported [...]

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These are my remarks from the Sunstone 2008 panel #331,  “Raise up a child in the way she should go…and which way is that?”  Several of you have asked Jana and I about how we’ve approached the spiritual aspects of raising our two precocious children, and two years spent outside the church have given us [...]

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I was happy to receive a link from Rick Heller about the Humanist Contemplatives of Houston, who focus on self improvement, introspection, and achieving eudaimonia. They gather to meditate or contemplate in a serene setting, offer mutual moral support in meeting personal challenges, experience the profound in the arts, and share new ideas and traditional [...]

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I taught the older kids’ Firstday School (aka Sunday School) at my Quaker meeting. The class consisted of me, my son (code named GameBoy), and my daughter (CatGirl). I took advantage of the situation and ditched my prepared lesson and began an informal discussion about our encounter thus far with Quakerism. We took turns going [...]

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To “swear not at all.” I received a jury summons today, and after reading it, realized that I might run into some difficulties as a Quaker and an atheist. Any Quakers or atheists out there want to tell me how I can avoid swearing an oath on the Bible, so help me God? Update: After [...]

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It started out like any other meeting for worship. I got there a bit late, and several people were already sitting quietly. I sidled over to an empty seat where I could see the “Peace” banners waving in the wind outside. I noticed that the clerk and the greeter were plain dressed, in the dark [...]

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Before you scroll or click any further, think of the first three adjectives that come to mind when you read the word, Mormon. Toss out any nouns and non-adjectives. No changing them (after all, this is an exercise in pseudo-free association), and don’t succumb to the temptation to type them in the comments as they [...]

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On the first Sunday of every month, someone reads a set of questions before we settle into silence at our meeting for worship. We can draw on these queries to guide us in our personal and group meditation. I wanted to post some of April’s queries here, partly for my sake, but also for catBonny [...]

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