The Gospel According to Fox News
It’s mysterious how swiftly a society can collectively change its mind. As rapidly as the financial markets crashed, so has Fox News’s credibility. What was gospel to an entire segment of voters and viewers just a few months ago has become a desperate flapping in the wind. Some may view this as part of the swing cycle that politics is heir to. But from the Reagan era forward, certain truths were held to be self-evident, and far from inventing anything, Fox News simply put the high gloss of mass media on them.
If you tune in to Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, or the network’s humbler toilers in the vineyard, their tactics haven’t changed. They must be shocked to find themselves stranded, all the more because it seemed to happen overnight.
SF Chronicle: Virtue and the White House
Although the Presidency is about issues, challenges, and complex negotiations, there’s another side. With every new President we get the pleasure of watching a human being adapt to the office. Very quickly an image emerges. Barack Obama entered the White House at a time of crisis, amid frayed nerves and anxiety. The image we wanted to see was pictured in advance by constant references to Lincoln and FDR, the two Presidents who overcame the deepest crises in our history.
Amid the dog show and the Easter egg roll, the whirlwind foreign visits and being the man who accompanied Michelle Obama to Europe (a wink-and-a-nod reference to JFK, another dapper celebrity politician), what do we feel about this new President as a human being?
Insights on Healing: A Deeper Understanding of Unity Consciousness
The limitations in the effectiveness of healing can be traced to the limitation on our understanding of the body. By understanding the body and health in the context of one universal process at the basis of the cosmos, we provide the basis for a comprehensive vision of health.
Your body is not a structure, it is a process. Your body, the ecosystem, and the universe are all one process.
When we look deeply within any structure it becomes obvious that structures are perceptual artifacts. Even a rock is made up of minerals, which are molecules, which are in turn composed of atoms. But the atoms are not solid entities. They are hierarchies of states of information and energy in a huge emptiness.
Personal Transformation Tools: Seven Steps to Releasing Emotional Turbulence
The practical procedure to transform toxic emotions. By transforming painful experience we not only heal ourselves, but we can also use that process to help ourselves grow spiritually from that experience.
Emotional turbulence interferes with emotional well being and initiative. Fear, anger, guilt and anxiety are deviations from natural condition of balance and stand in the way of spiritual evolution. Restoring balance can be evolutionary in itself.
How to Cope with Economic Stress
Deepak advises on how to keep our spirits up in the current economic crisis and viewers ask about the difference between wants and needs, and spending money.
Pakistan’s Hellish Road to Paradise
What can we do when one man’s Paradise is another man’s brutal dictatorship? This question faces the world once again with regard to Pakistan. It was announced on Feb. 16 that the Pakistani government had reached an agreement with the pro-Taliban insurgents in the turbulent northwest region of that country. In exchange for peace, the government agreed to institute Shariah law, based on Islamic principles of jurisprudence.
Washington Post On Faith: Rumi on Love: Making Sense of Ecstasy
Strange as it sounds, the recent collapse of the economy was predicted in a nursery rhyme. Every child in past generations learned it, although I don’t know if they do now.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
But what are these values, exactly?
Washington Post On Faith: Rumi on Love: Making Sense of Ecstasy
If they are in the spirit, people turn their thoughts to love on Valentine’s Day. It would be fitting to honor someone who never took his thoughts away from love: Rumi, A.D. 1207-1273, the greatest of Persian poets. No one has made more sense of ecstasy, raising the fleeting impulse of passion into something permanent and abiding.
The dust of the centuries hasn’t dimmed Rumi’s amorousness, which began with the flesh and ended with God. Actually, that’s not right. His passion was for the flesh and God at the same time, without the slightest gap between them. In the middle of one verse he burns for his lover:
