by A L Katz & Randy Lovejoy
Ideally, a spiritual journey connects you to the world outside your head and all the other creatures in it. You see your place in the world on a micro and macro level. You find inner peace and a path toward further enlightenment. Then, once connected, ideally, your spirituality will spur you to do something to change the world (hopefully for the better). Alas, that’s not always what happens.
Why does spirituality sometimes fail to produce acts that effectuate the change it aspires to? Is Spirituality and activism way too big for one podcast to cover? Hell, yeah!
To be honest, when Randy and I sat down to record episode 7, we thought it would be a one-n-done. A good convo about an interesting topic. Turned out there was more on the bones than we realized. Lots more.
NOTES & SOURCES
CITY OF GOD (from Wikipedia):
A book of Christian philosophy written in Latin by Augustine of Hippo in the early 5th century AD. The book was in response to allegations that Christianity brought about the decline of Rome and is considered one of Augustine’s most important works, standing alongside The Confessions, The Enchiridion, On Christian Doctrine, and On the Trinity. As a work of one of the most influential Church Fathers, The City of God is a cornerstone of Western thought, expounding on many profound questions of theology, such as the suffering of the righteous, the existence of evil, the conflict between free will and divine omniscience, and the doctrine of original sin.
La Isla Del Tigre, Honduras
https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Isla_del_Tigre
Mohammed Yunus
(from The Nobel Prize’s Web Site) “Banker to the Poor” — Professor Muhammad Yunus established the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983, fueled by the belief that credit is a fundamental human right. His objective was to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them and by teaching them a few sound financial principles so they could help themselves.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2006/yunus/biographical/
Frederich Nietzsche
(From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher and cultural critic who published intensively in the 1870s and 1880s. He is famous for uncompromising criticisms of traditional European morality and religion, as well as of conventional philosophical ideas and social and political pieties associated with modernity. Many of these criticisms rely on psychological diagnoses that expose false consciousness infecting people’s received ideas; for that reason, he is often associated with a group of late modern thinkers (including Marx and Freud) who advanced a “hermeneutics of suspicion” against traditional values
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/
Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910)
(from History.com) — Known as “The Lady With the Lamp,” Florence Nightingale was a British nurse, social reformer and statistician best known as the founder of modern nursing. Her experiences as a nurse during the Crimean War were foundational in her views about sanitation. She established St. Thomas’ Hospital and the Nightingale Training School for Nurses in 1860. Her efforts to reform healthcare greatly influenced the quality of care in the 19 and 20 centuries.
Isiah 26:18
The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
Rene Girard (1923 – 2015)
(From the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) — René Girard wrote from the perspective of a wide variety of disciplines: Literary Criticism, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, History, Biblical Hermeneutics and Theology. His work is becoming increasingly recognized in the humanities, and his commitment as a Christian thinker has given him prominence among theologians.