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"Wholy Holy" (Marvin Gaye)

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Columbia Memorial Hospital faced the Catskills in the distance and stood just a half mile from the first living room I remember. The apartment possessed only two bedrooms, already too small for my father, mother, two older sisters, and newborn me. In a couple years, when my dad got a better job, we’d move. If child-bearing wasn’t what it was (and remains), I imagine my mom might have walked me home that week. But childbirth, rightly called labor, exhausts thoroughly. And with three kids all under five years of age and with a husband often working, parenthood never stopped exhausting my mother. April 10 th  of 1971 brought unseasonably wintry weather, a pointed, probing wind across the river and our city of the same name. And the alley off of Worth Avenue in downtown Hudson, New York included a steep hill up. My mom didn’t walk me home.   1971, historically speaking, isn’t notorious or notable for things like military or terrorist attacks, political assassinations, or the end...
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Music As a Metaphor for God

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I have a friend, a dear friend in fact, someone I respect and admire. I’ll call him as I often do, G. When rarely the subject of religion comes up, G half-jokingly and half-proudly will declare himself a non-believer and anti-organized religion. He’d agree with Gandhi who’s been purported as saying, “I like Christ but I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” At the same time, G profoundly loves music, Gospel music included. This love reaches the level of the sacred to him. Music provides him meaning, comfort, and joy, as essential to him as God is to others. G and I disagree when it comes to religion and God. But when it comes to music we are in sync. There is common ground there. Music is sacred to me, essential, a source of meaning, comfort, and joy. And G and I agree on the spiritual and musical genius of John Coltrane who composed and performed the musical masterpiece called A Love Supreme. The 4th and final movement of A Love Supreme ends with...
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Buddhism & Christianity: Sin, Salvation, Overlap

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Let’s move on to two other questions: For Buddhism and Christianity: Are humans fundamentally good? What goes wrong? For Christianity, as we know, humans are created in God’s image, enlivened by the Spirit of God. Life in Eden marks the original plan for human beings. Unity between humanity and God and balance in creation was the reality in the beginning. But with Adam and Eve’s fateful decisions, a shift occurs. Christians have deemed it the Fall. A fall into what? Into the reality of sin. From the bite of the bitter fruit thereafter, sin marks human life. There are differences of opinion on how deep the effect of Adam and Eve’s sin goes. The line of Augustine, which crosses the Catholic-Protestant divide into Luther, and Calvin, says sin runs very deep, arguing that the guilt for the original sin of Adam and Eve is passed on to every human born thereafter. Even infants carry the guilt of original sin, and thus deserve the consequence of judgment and punishment sin carries...
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