Modern Religions For A Lonely World

In addressing the meaning crisis — the vacuum left by the failures of religion, modernism, postmodernism, and today’s online alternatives — it takes a return to what bona fide religion really captures. The communitas. The ecstasy. The ritual.
Alexander Beiner • Is Religion Coming Back?

I grew up believing what all modern people are taught: that freedom meant lack of constraint. Orthodoxy taught me that this freedom was no freedom at all, but enslavement to the passions: a neat description of the first thirty years of my life. True freedom, it turns out, is to give up your will and follow God’s. To deny yourself. To let it come. I... See more
The prevailing materialistic culture has created a divided world where the sacred is relegated to churches and temples, the body to the gym, mental health to pills from the pharmacy. Economic growth is pursued as if it had nothing to do with the environment and ignorance, racism, and warfare continue to separate people and nations. These divisions
... See moreStanislav Grof • Holotropic Breathwork, Second Edition: A New Approach to Self-Exploration and Therapy (SUNY series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology)
You will watch your parents die and be buried. You will watch your newborn child emerge in a messy circus of heaving grunts and high-pitched wailing. You will watch your dreams and projects dashed, only to wake the next day and greet the fruits of your failure anew and cobble a life out of them all the same. You will punctuate the cavalcade of even
... See more
Jules Evans defined a religion as a system that binds us in religio: a kind of sacredness, obligation, faith and “cosmic certainty” towards a particular set of precepts. Those outside the religio are framed as “existential threats”, with a strong in-out dynamic bound by a common transcendent ideal.