Great events tend to move more by image than by realities. At their most powerful, images are perceptions that grip the mind stronger than statistics, scientific studies, expert testimony, education, and the other tools of reason. We are experiencing a massive image shift right now, and since so many of...

An article in the Washington Post On Faith section in response to their question: "According to a new Pew survey, 21% of American atheists believe in God or a universal spirit, 12% believe in heaven and 10% pray at least once a week. What do you make of this?"

The...

Continuing the list of what we need in terms of awareness to prevail in difficult times:

3 A vision of the future.
When people are asleep, the future is a repetition of the past, because inertia can do little else. Conservation, the party of inertia, represents...

An article written for the Washington Post On Faith section.

There's a single book that I reread every year: "I Am That" by Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981). The title is a quotation. In India the goal of enlightenment is to see reality as a whole. When all illusion has fallen...

Eighty years after the great economist John Maynard Keynes observed that the market is psychological and goes up and down primarily because of how investors feel, few people grasp how profound he was. We still rely on objective standards that are only marginally credible: graphs and models, price swings turned...

An article in the Washington Post On Faith section in response to their question about the controversy over the movie The Love Guru.

The inability of some religious people to laugh at themselves betrays, I think, a great deal of insecurity. What if God was a two-year-old toddler and...

Societies never act in totally predictable ways. In response to the global economic crisis of the mid-Seventies, induced by OPEC tripling the price of oil overnight, every country was put to the test. Energy policies proposed by Jimmy Carter, which rested on the notion of consumer restraint (e.g., turning the...

An video interview on CNN Money where I discuss the creation of wisdom-based economies. Click http://money.cnn.com/video/ then select 'Corn Chips and Spirituality'

This was originally posted in the Washington Post's "On Faith" section in response to their question: "Do you believe that faith can effect your health or is that a lot of new age nonsense?"

Faith is too vast a subject to generalize about-- its effects are indisputably not "New Age...

One aspect of modern politics has been to elevate the trivial to unheard of heights. By any serious measure, Barack Obama holds an enormous advantage over John McCain. His poise, intelligence, and charisma are undeniable, as is the utter ruin of the right-wing agenda with which McCain has many ties....

An article in the Washington Post On Faith section in response to their question regarding Senator Obama's decision to leave United Trinity Church.

After Barack Obama resigned his church membership, one could hear a collective sigh of relief. The standard reactions were "He had no choice," "It's the right thing...

A article in TIME magazine on the Love Guru movie

www.intentblog.com

www.deepakchopra.com

An article in the Washington Post On Faith in response to their question:
Greed, one of the seven deadly sins, is seen as a major factor in the housing market crash and the oil price spike. Can greed ever be justified morally or religiously?

The Amorality of the Free...

A Washington Post On Faith article in response to their question: The California Supreme Court has overturned that state's ban on gay marriage. Is marriage a legal right or a sacred rite? Should the state be involved in marriage? Should religious institutions?

"Let Me Not to the Marriage of...

Anyone who wants to reform American politics has to seriously consider the pros and cons of lying. Telling people what they want to hear has rarely lost an election. Yet nobody wants to be on the Titanic, reassured that what they felt was just a tiny bump.

To begin...

An article in the Washington Post in response to their question:

Some Christian leaders issued "An Evangelical Manifesto" last week to depoliticize the term 'evangelical.' "We evangelicals are defined theologically, and not politically, socially or culturally," they said.

In your mind, what is the definition of an evangelical?...

I have no patience for theories of universal evil -- that is, attributing evil to Satan, the fall of man, genes, human nature, or unnamed dark forces lurking in our unconscious. In one way or another, these theories have increased the effects of evil rather than alleviating them. In addition,...

In a recent interview for his new book on democracy, Bill Moyers presented the bleakest face of goodness that one could imagine. He is too gentle to mount a jeremiad, yet Moyers' recent career has been one long lamentation. He says, "Politics can create problems that politics can't solve," citing...

An article in the Washington Post in response to their question:
The percentage of voters who find Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama "honest and trustworthy" is declining as the campaign wears on. Why? From a moral standpoint, how important is this quality in a president?
...

In the generation before Shakespeare, the French essayist Montaigne remarked that cruelty and vengeance are so inherent in human nature that we wouldn't be ourselves without them. In so many words, Shakespeare said the same thing in his tragedies and histories. Would Hamlet be as interesting if he weren't bent...