A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
Wednesday, September 8, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Learning From Failure
It can be hard to tell what’s a failure and what’s just something that is shifting your life in a different direction. In other words, failure can be the portal to creativity, to learning something new, to having a fresh perspective.
Via Daily Dharma: Just Love Them
Forget about things done or left to do. Forget about deadlines and milestones, profits and quotas. Those will be taken care of—they always are. So don’t worry. Whenever a being appears in front of you, just love them. That is your focus. That’s where the real work lies.
Monday, September 6, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: The Cause of Merriment
Online: Sunday meditation and dharma talk, “Chan and Socially Engaged Practice”, with Guo Gu (Chan)
Guo Gu’s dharma talk will explore Chan and Social Engaged Practice.
Guo Gu (Dr. Jimmy Yu) is the founder of the Tallahassee Chan Center, the founder of the socially engaged inter-denominational Buddhist organization, Dharma Relief, and a professor of Buddhism and East Asian religions at Florida State University. He was a monk for nine years and one of the late Master Sheng Yen’s senior and closest disciples. He is the author of Silent Illumination (2021), The Essence of Chan (2020), and Passing Through the Gateless Barrier (2016). To connect with Guo Gu, visit his personal website at https://www.guogulaoshi.org.
Sunday Night Sit Online Schedule:
6:15 Zoom opens
6:30 Welcome and announcements
6:45 Meditation, including mindful movement led by our teacher
7:20 Break
7:30 Dharma talk
8:30 Closing bell
Meeting ID: 940 933 642
Passcode: 765183
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Meeting ID: 940 933 642
Passcode: 765183
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Sunday, September 5, 2021
Via Daily Dharma: Hold Fast
Via Daily Dharma: Nothing Special
Via Tricycle // A New Paradigm for Science and Religion
Opening Our Minds to Save Our World
In September’s Dharma Talk series, "A New Paradigm for Science and Religion," Tibetan Buddhist teacher, scholar, and translator B. Alan Wallace presents a bold vision of science and religion joining in a spirit of radical empiricism and open-minded inquiry. Together, he suggests, these two knowledge systems can help us to adopt a more expansive view of the nature of reality—and to reduce suffering and find true happiness in a time of global uncertainty.
Wallace has studied Buddhist philosophy and practice for the past 50 years, seeking to marry the wisdom of the dharma with the insights of modern science. He is the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies and author of books including Tibetan Buddhism from the Ground Up and The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind.
Via The Tricycle Community // Just Love Them
Just Love Them
By Vanessa Zuisei Goddard
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Via Daily Dharma: Finding Gratitude
Via White Crane Institute // "TREATMENT ACTIVIST GUERRILLAS" (TAG)
On this date a group of AIDS activists called "TREATMENT ACTIVIST GUERRILLAS" (TAG) accomplished one of the funniest and most outrageous bits of public activism when they literally put an enormous condom over the home of rabid homophobe and AIDS death accomplice Senator Jesse Helms in Arlington, Virginia. The activists knew they only had seven minutes before the police showed up. You can see the action in the 2012 documentary How To Survive and Plague. Here: https://youtu.be/Nrr0eA34CSM
Thursday, September 2, 2021
Via White Crane Institute // This Day in Gay History - JOHN M. MCNEILL
This Day in Gay History
September 02
JOHN M. MCNEILL, Jesuit scholar, psychotherapist, born (d: 2015); For more than twenty-five years John J. McNeill, an ordained priest and psychotherapist, devoted his life to spreading the good news of God's love for Lesbian and Gay Christians. One year after the publication of The Church and the Homosexual (1976), McNeill received an order from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican ordering him to silence in the public media. He observed the silence for nine years while continuing a private ministry to Gays and Lesbians which included psychotherapy, workshops, lectures and retreats.
In 1988, he received a further order from Cardinal Ratzinger (soon to become Pope Benedict XVI, the first Pope to resign in a millennium) directing him to give up all ministry to Gay persons which he refused to do in conscience. As a result, he was expelled by the Vatican from the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) for challenging the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church on the issue of homosexuality, and for refusing to give up his ministry and psychotherapy practice to Gay men and Lesbians. McNeill had been a Jesuit for nearly 40 years.
After enlisting in the U.S. Army during World War II at the age of seventeen, McNeill served in combat in the Third Army under General Patton and was captured in Germany in 1944. McNeill spent six months as a POW (Prisoner of War) until he was liberated in May of 1945. John enrolled in Canisius College in Buffalo after his discharge from the army and, upon graduating, entered the Society of Jesus in 1948. He was ordained a Jesuit priest in 1959.
In 1964, McNeill earned a Doctorate in Philosophy, with highest honors (Plus Grande Distinction), at Louvain University in Belgium. His doctoral thesis on the philosophical and religious thought of Maurice Blondel was published in 1966 as the first volume of the series Studies in the History of Christian Thought edited by Heiko Oberman and published by Brill Press in Leyden, Holland.
During his professional career, McNeill taught philosophy at LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY, and in the doctorate program at Fordham University in NYC. In 1972, he joined the combined Woodstock Jesuit Seminary and Union Theological Seminary faculty as professor of Christian Ethics, specializing in Sexual Ethics.
In 1974, McNeill was co-founder of the New York City chapter of Dignity, a group for Catholic Gays and Lesbians. For over twenty-five years, he has been active in a ministry to Gay Christians through retreats, workshops, lectures, publications, etc. For twenty years John was a leader of semiannual retreats at the Kirkridge Retreat Center in Pennsylvania.
Via Daily Dharma: Patience Helps the Heart