This is a story about serendipity and fortuitousness, luck and good fortune, beauty and love, and is restorative of an optimism that is too often dismissed in contemporary society.

I have to let the loudness of God take me away to wherever I need to be. I'll still go to seven different churches and read through the piles of religious of books I've hoarded in my room, but they can't tell me anything compared to what God can tell me.

On May 5, 1813, Søren Kierkegaard was born in a well-off home in the northern European town of Copenhagen. The Great Dane's works have found their way woven into fiction and philosophy, especially via that of the 20th-century Existentialists like Heidegger and Sartre.

I'm a Catholic / but I think Islam is beautiful / Some think I'm interested in converting / No, I'm not / it just makes me think of the one above

I am Catholic deep in my heart, though I don't practice in the accepted ways. I know there are many like me, waiting for a community modeled on the community around Jesus, who, in my view, didn't intend to found a religion but to inspire a sane and beautiful way of life.

I didn't see the Goddess honored in the Holy Land of Jerusalem, but I did feel her in the Holy Land.  I felt her swimming in the sea, in the clouds at sunset, with the flow of the river that goes through Tel-Aviv, in the peaceful quiet of the desert, and in the salt of the Dead Sea.

I want to thank God for somehow giving me this idea to read the Bible, cover to cover. It made me reflect a ton, learn a ton and I absolutely feel more spiritual, and more happy.

Religion, in its essence, is simply the institution that has been established by human beings to collect spiritual teachings and practices in order to strengthen our connection to Spirit.

Spirituality can lead to a relationship with God, but religiosity demands the fulfillment of obligations to God.

I get why people would create the dichotomy between spirituality and religiosity. But, as a Christian, it is by living with both the beauty and the brokenness of humanity that we discover who we are.

By expanding and deepening the way we frame the subject of religion, we can examine religious institutions and spiritual phenomena in a more productive way. Here's a model I find useful.