The Wordless Mystical and the Spirituality of Belief

In our day, at least among what passes as urbane and polite company, anything short of an enthusiastic affirmation of the full range of religious expression, including none, as anything other than the manifestation of an enriching difference, and as the enlightened antidote to any suggestion that some religion is true to the exclusion of others, means that one risks being stained with the dirtiest of modernist sobriquets: that of being a “fundamentalist”! In fact, this litmus test of liberality, dividing the drive toward acidic ethnoscleansing in the name of universal reason,1 on the one hand, from the base, parochial mythos of ein Volk, in the name of simple common sense, on the other, separates, from both sides, “us” against “them.” Anyone who has travelled widely among Friends, weaving their vine through our various branches, would be hard pressed to imagine that we do much if anything more than simply reproduce this dichotomy among ourselves, across which we, too, are polarized and, it seems to me, paralyzed—at least insofar as we might hope to think beyond our particular ideological boxes, insofar, that is, as we might hope to think

Response to Anderson, Ward, and Randazzo

In this issue we have been gifted with three credible, nay expert, expositors of three interpretations of Quakerism in historical perspective: Penn’s interpretation of Quakerism as “primitive Christianity revived,” Barclay’s evolving interpretation of Quakerism’s “inward Light” as vehiculum dei, and his speculation on a corresponding spiritual sense, and the twentieth century development of Quaker understandings of Christianity and universalism—mutually excluding or complementary?—traced across the prestigious Swarthmore Lectures

Review of Daniel P. Coleman, Presence and Process: A Path Toward Transformative Faith and Inclusive Community

Daniel P. Coleman is an evangelical Friend who in this book pushes hard for an agenda that many liberal Friends will heartily embrace, though I suspect to the discomfort of the bulk of his fellow evangelicals. Based on his own experience at the nexus of Christianity, Quakerism, and Buddhist inspired meditative practices, his thesis, in short, is that the heart of true religion is a mystical, pre-rational (and thus pre-discursive) connection with Reality (perhaps a synonym for “God”), which is the essence of all religions once the superficial, thought-based particularities of doctrine are stripped away. His hope for the revival of religion in the twenty-first century lies in the recovery and popularization of the meditative/contemplative practices that have been developed by the esoteric few (mostly monastics) of all religions throughout their histories, and that are the pathway into this transformative experience of Reality

Науково-технологічний розвиток Литви та перспективи литовсько-українського співробітництва в інноваційній сфері

Розглянуто стан та перспективи науково-технологічного розвитку Литви. Показано основні конкурентоспроможні сфери інновацій (інформаційні технології, біотехнології, спеціалізовані лазерні технології тощо), проаналізовано основні напрями інноваційної політики і стратегії. Наведено результати SWOT-аналізу інноваційного розвитку Литви. Запропоновано можливі напрями і механізми науково-технологічного співробітництва Литви та України