dalai lama

Asaram Bapu continues to make trouble, even without speaking.

As I write this piece, 119 Tibetans have set themselves on fire, choosing to end their lives to further the cause of the Tibetan people. Tupten Ngödrup, a former monk and the first Tibetan to immolate, took his own life in India in 1998. The next such act would not take place until 2009…

Or maybe it’s not so simple.

At the end of the day, ministry without meaningful engagement is merely a form of advertising.

The Dalai Lama recommends a radical new approach: a religionless religion, stripped of myth, superstition, and narrow dogmatism, and focused on the practical work of transforming human behavior.

What about the peaceful, warm, accepting, cross-legged men wearing funny, exotic robes?

What’s he aiming at?

“People always leaving just as other folks arrive.” That is the line that suddenly came to mind when I learned that Father Matthew Kelty left this world peacefully at noon on Friday last. This is a great loss to those of us newly, and not-so-newly, arrived, and I wanted to try to explain why I think this is so. This remarkable monk spent fifty off-and-on years at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where he was the last confessor that Thomas Merton ever had; and if that wasn’t enough to warrant further discussion, he was also a gay priest who came out in one of his most eloquent essays at the ripe old age of ninety. We will not soon see the likes of such monks again.

A report from India in the wake of new protests. “The emotions are much stronger—the sense of concern, the sense of anxiety, the urgency,” an activist says. “You have your fellow beings torturing themselves… So when this is happening in Tibet, of course people here feel very intense and strongly. But what we can do is very limited.”

This year has marked, I believe, the beginning of the end of the war between science and religion. Creationism cannot last. The New Atheists are now old (or departed). And between these camps the middle ground continues to expand. Indeed, many folks have been hard at it, doing a new kind of peace work. Some have done it intentionally, some have not. Outliers, both atheist and religious hardliners, continue to wage battle but they look increasingly irrelevant.