#inclusive prayer

[compassionmattersmost]

A Prayer for America

A Heartfelt Prayer for Our Nation: Embracing Unity and Compassion In this pivotal moment of transition, we are called to gather our hearts and minds, reflecting on our shared values as Americans. This prayer serves as a beacon of hope and a reminder of the strength we possess when we come together, transcending our differences. May the light of righteousness, loving-kindness, compassion, truth,…

[broomsick]

Invocation to the Gods for a pride month celebration!

Join us, Gods and Goddesses!

Come from your radiant halls and join!

See how we are gathered in your honor,

And in friendship and love!

We celebrate you and we celebrate ourselves

In the season of plenty that is granted by the Wanes!

Join us, Óðinn, Allfather of many faces,

Who is both a man and a woman, and neither at once!

Join us, Loki, silver-tongued Sly One,

Who can never be bound by constructs of gender!

Join us, Freyja, fierce Lady of the Slain,

Who ignites love and urges all to be true to themselves!

Join us, Yngvi-Freyr, generous King of Kings,

Who nurtures peace and quiets conflict!

Join us, Thórr, strong-spirited Son of Earth,

Who protects outcasts and slays persecutors!

Join us, Baldr, luminous Son of Óðinn,

Who quells sorrow with light and comfort!

Join us, Týr, Fosterer of Wolves,

Who brings justice and gives strength to all!

Join us, Gods of Ásgarðr and of Vanaheimr!

Join us, spirits of the Earth and of Jötunheimr!

Celebrate with us the strength of those who fight

And of those who bend to no hate!

In your names, for our friends and chosen families,

We make no apology and embody our true selves on this day!

Art

[altarofanorsepagan]

introduction ⋆˙⟡ꨄ

aurora, north, or rockrose; she/fae/they pronouns, queer

norse pagan & beginner witch, particularly cosmic witchcraft. my religion is closeted, so i practice in discreet and simple ways

a devotee of freyja, skaði, and hel; i do scattered worship of several other norse gods, along with artemis (only non-norse deity i worship currently). i'm still new to this religion so i'm researching a lot!

this is a side blog for me to post and reblog pagan-related things! i also like to reblog aesthetics and such that remind me of the gods. my main is @angelellipsis-devilofdots.

inclusive heathenry only. white supremacists, terfs, other exclusionary heathens will be blocked. you are not welcome here.

banner here, profile picture here, lunar divider here

[meadofpoetry]

“—is prayer a gift or a petition, or does it matter?”

This quote from a Mary Oliver poem activated a very heathen train of thought for me...

My initial thought was prayer as a gift. Words of devotion to a god, an offering of love and adoration. But the word petition made me think twice. A petition suggests a desire for change. And is prayer not also a request? Asking for a deity’s presence and guidance? Perhaps their intercession?

And then the final phrase — does it matter?

My thought — could it be both?

In the heathen faith, gifts are paired with the knowledge that they are met with gifts in return. "A gift for a gift," some of us say in blót. So is a gift then not also a type of petition? Do gifts not come with the awareness that something will return to the gift-giver in reciprocity? Perhaps a less direct form of petition, but still voicing an expectation of change to come?

Thanks for reading this, friend. :)

[the-polyam-polytheist]

Angrboda, mother of monsters, how long did you weep, when they took away your children? do you weep now at the state of the world? protect them, please. the orphaned children, childless parents.

Sigyn, how long since you last slept? when they first bound him up, did you shriek with pain?

no one protects Gaza from venom, right now.

Loki, changemaker. please, make change. this must never again be this must end.

[thebajoranwitch]

why I (a person of science) believe in a higher power

I know my updates are completely all over the place but I was just talking to my partner about how science and theism cannot only coexist but can compliment each other so wonderfully, like the way that patterns arise mathematically and how galaxies form, how we became sentient. I remember a line from a lecture from professor Brian Cox we attended together

”humanity is the universe trying to understand itself”

Now, Cox is known for being a staunch atheist but I think that this line and indeed the sentiment encapsulates it beautifully. For me, for my partner, faith and science are not two separate parts of our lives, they are connected inextricably.

He is a physicist and he uses the example of how the laws of physics are so perfect for life that it is as if it’s planned.

I’m in earth science and the beauty of evolution and of the conditions of earth, of life itself seem to just call out that someone is there.

you might disagree with me, you might partially agree, you might totally agree. I kept this a little bit vague for people of all faiths who are in STEM fields to maybe connect with.

so for those who need to hear it: it is ok to bring your god/s into the lab (as long as they wear goggles 😉)

[elisabethbabarci]

When we promote community, we are blessed with the presence of individuals whose origins stem from many different parts of the world, who are of a diverse nature, practice different cultural traditions and religions, that are foreign to our own. The freedom to practice one’s own religion is the hallmark of a free, inclusive and accepting society.

Elisabeth Babarci

[ignorantsanonymous]

The Tragedy Prayer

"Let us offer up a prayer to those who have perished in this nightmarish act of cruelty today.

And I remind you all, once again, that we pray not to God, but to ourselves; to sharpen our minds and to focus our wills.

Our Power, which burns within Us, exquisite be Our Might.

Our Kingdom come, Our Will be done, on Earth as it is within Us.

Give Us this day our fondest wish, and improve ever upon Us, as we strive ever to improve Ourselves.

And lead Us not into corruption or malaise, but give Us strength to persist in the face of adversity.

Lives have been taken needlessly from Us by a loathsome lost soul on a mission of evil.

May the sickness of this rotten death-urge vacate Our collective Being.

May the exploiters of tragedy find that their words turn to shit in their mouths.

May the deniers of tragedy find that they are denied mercy until they repent.

May the cruelty of this world be alleviated by the love and fellowship and brotherhood and sisterhood and siblinghood that We may find in Ourselves.

To love One Another and to serve One Another and to serve those that love Us.

And may Those whose souls are on this day scorched with pain and anguish find Their way to the balm of kindness.

Let Those who have been so darkly touched by the worst of humanity see now the best of it.

And may Our differences be cast aside, and all the bullshit cut through, until all that is left is the truth.

Let it be so."

-TJ Kirk (May 2022)

[nurseshannansreviews]

🌄 I hadn't been to church for a while and was searching for something that was inclusive for all faiths, political backgrounds and lifestyles. I started listening to the BETWEEN @between.church podcast and love the vibe! I love how the host Matt Mattson talks with guests from all kinds of backgrounds about faith and human connection. The mailing list is also a wonderful way to get weekly and daily inspiration about how to infuse every interaction with the best of what the world’s faith traditions (especially your own) can teach everyone around you.

🌄 The people over at BETWEEN are really doing something special by actively inviting and including everyone! I love the daily prayers and all the inspiration! They really are re-teaching us all how to truly connect with each other in sacred ways! To learn more and sign of fir their podcast and/or mailing list vist -

🌞 BETWEEN Podcast - https://between.church/podcast

🌞 BETWEEN Mailing list -

https://between.church/join

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Jonathan Haidt

Published: Sep 23, 2022

In 2016 I gave a lecture at Duke University: “Two Incompatible Sacred Values in American Universities.” I suggested that the ancient Greek word telos was helpful for understanding the rapid cultural change going on at America’s top universities that began in the fall of 2015. Telos means “the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims.” The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth, I suggested. The word (or close cognates) appears on many university crests, and our practices and norms — some stretching back to Plato’s academy — only make sense if you see a university as an institution organized to help scholars get closer to truth using the particular methods of their field.

I said that universities can have many goals (such as fiscal health and successful sports teams) and many values (such as social justice, national service, or Christian humility), but they can have only one telos, because a telos is like a North Star. An institution can rotate on one axis only. If it tries to elevate a second goal or value to the status of a telos, it is like trying to get a spinning top or rotating solar system to simultaneously rotate around two axes. I argued that the protests and changes that were suddenly sweeping through universities were attempts to elevate the value of social justice to become a second telos, which would require a huge restructuring of universities and their norms in ways that damaged their ability to find truth.

I expanded on this argument in a blog post for Heterodox Academy, predicting that “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable. … Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.”

It’s now six years later, and I think it’s clear that this prediction has come true. It has been six years of near-constant conflict, with rising numbers of attempts to get scholars fired or punished for things they have said, and a never-ending stream of videos showing students (and sometimes professors) saying and doing things that are gifts to critics of universities and of the left. As one university president said to a friend of mine in 2019, “Universities are becoming ungovernable.” Public trust in universities has plummeted since 2015, first on the right, but later across the board. We are in trouble.

How do we get out of this mess? How do we regain the respect of the public? There is no easy answer because many of our problems are tied to the broader problems of the country, particularly its ever-intensifying political-polarization spiral, and the increasing levels of anxiety and fragility of our incoming students.

But even if America is far down the road to political and institutional collapse, it is still incumbent on every professor to act properly and professionally in the meantime — in part because professionals abandoning their duties in our political and epistemic institutions is a major cause of the collapse. So how do we act properly and professionally? What is the right thing to do when there are so many competing crises, each with its own moral demands? Should professors engage in political activism — in their teaching and in their research — and push their universities and professional associations to do so as well?

In the rest of this essay I’d like to introduce the concept of fiduciary duty, which complements the concept of telos and can help explain the moral incoherence that has overtaken the academy since 2015, as well as give us a moral foundation upon which to stand when we resist pressures to violate our duties.

The word fiduciary comes to us from the Latin fidere, “to trust.” In any large-scale society, people need to rely on others who are not kin, often when they are in a position of vulnerability. Roman, English, and later American law all developed legal designations that enable some people or institutions to hire themselves out as “trustees” who act as “agents” of the person (the “principal”) who invests trust in them. Such agents have fiduciary duties toward their beneficiaries, which means first and foremost absolute loyalty. They must put the needs of the beneficiary first and must never, ever profit at the beneficiary’s expense. They must avoid and eliminate all conflicts of interest, because the lure of such potential benefits can — and often does — corrupt and subvert the fiduciary’s ability to carry out their duty.

American corporate law has interpreted fiduciary duties using the psychology of purity and sanctity. A fiduciary relationship is treated as something different, higher, purer, than a simple contractual relationship. As explained by the Supreme Court justice Benjamin Cardozo in 1928:

A trustee is held to something stricter than the morals of the market place. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior. As to this there has developed a tradition that is unbending and inveterate. ... Only thus has the level of conduct for fiduciaries been kept at a level higher than that trodden by the crowd.

Is the concept of fiduciary duty useful in the academy? To what must professors show such absolute loyalty, such elevated ethics, with no deviations or compromises?

We have two such duties, related to our two distinct roles as teachers and as scholars. As teachers I believe we have a fiduciary duty to our students’ education. As scholars I believe we have a fiduciary duty to the truth.

Let me note right away that the concept doesn’t fit perfectly. Our students are not our principals, and we are not their agents. We are not obligated to act in their best interest overall; we are duty-bound to advance their education and never to act in a way that retards it. When we do our jobs well, we are professional educators, not therapists, coaches, or parents. Similarly for the truth: It is not a person or “principal” who hired us as “agents” and can give us orders. So I’m going to call these relationships “quasi-fiduciary duties.”

But the elements of elevated ethics, near-sacredness, and a ban on conflicts of interest work quite well, as you can see from some hypothetical examples of professors with such conflicts. The mere contemplation of such situations should give us all a feeling of discomfort or disgust.

Professor A assigns his own textbook to his psychology class even though the book is 20 years out of date because he wants to maximize his royalty payments.

Professor B plans her psychology lecture on love and sexuality in a way that she knows will make her appealing to young men because she likes to date those men after they have graduated from college and become “fair targets.”

Professor C is an evangelical Christian teaching English literature in a secular university who chooses readings and uses his lectures to encourage students who are lapsed Christians to renew their faith in Jesus Christ.

Professor D is a right-wing activist teaching English literature at a state school in a red state. She chooses readings and uses her lectures to encourage students to support her favorite right-wing causes and candidates.

Do you agree that all four of these professors have behaved unprofessionally? All four are treating their students as means to advance their own ends: financial, sexual, religious, and political. (I made Professor D be right-wing, but I assume you’ll agree that the violation is just as bad for a left-wing activist in a blue state.) All four have therefore violated their quasi-fiduciary duty of loyalty, which requires them to advance their students’ education, not their own projects. All four should be subject to disciplinary action.

We can do the same thought experiment for professors as scholars and scientists who violate their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth:

Professor A works hard to prove that social media is not harmful to adolescents because a social-media platform pays her $100,000 for each study she publishes that supports that conclusion.

Professor B decides to spin his research findings away from what he knows is true in order to avoid taking a controversial stance because he knows that such a stance would reduce his ability to find sexual partners.

Professor C is a biblical scholar who distorts her translation of an ancient manuscript because she believes that an accurate translation would cause some people to lose faith in God.

Professor D is a left-wing political scientist who deletes all of the qualitative interviews he has conducted for his book that he thinks might make progressives look bad.

What do you think of these four professors? Did they behave professionally, or did they violate their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth? I think they all distorted their scholarship and put work out into the public that is not honest, not faithful to the truth, because they were pursuing their own personal agendas — for money, sex, religion, and politics. (Once again, I assume you’ll agree that Professor D is equally culpable whether he’s on the left or the right.) All four would bring disgrace to the academy if their actions became known.

I have been thinking a lot about fiduciary duty because my main professional association — the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, known as SPSP — recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth. I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining “whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.” Our research proposal would be evaluated on older criteria of scientific merit, along with this new criterion.

These sorts of mandatory diversity statements have been proliferating across the academy in recent years. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Academic Freedom Alliance, and many professors have written about why they are immoral, inappropriate, and sometimes illegal. I’ll add one additional concern: Most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity. I refuse to do this, but I’ve never objected publicly.

The SPSP mandate, however, forced us all to do something more explicitly ideological. Note that the word diversity was dropped and replaced by anti-racism. So every psychologist who wants to present at the most important convention in our field must now say how their work advances anti-racism. I read Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist in the summer of 2020, so I knew that I could no longer stay silent.

I wrote to Laura King, the president of SPSP (and a friend from way back in the first years of positive psychology). I asked her if this was really now an SPSP policy. In her response she reaffirmed the telos of SPSP: “SPSP’s mission remains to advance the science, teaching, and application of social and personality psychology.” She then said that she thought part of that mission “should involve amplifying the voices of those who have historically been underrepresented in our field.” That is a view I agree with: Diversity stated in that unobjectionable form can be a value of the organization. But (like all values), I think it must not be raised to a second telos. She also affirmed that, yes, the mandatory statements are now official policy, and she added: “I am not super clear on why anti-racism is viewed as problematic.”

I wrote back to explain why I thought it was problematic, quoting passages from Kendi’s book, such as this one:

The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.

I explained why I thought the claim was incorrect from a social-science perspective because there are obviously many other remedies. And I explained why I thought the claim was incorrect morally because it requires us to treat people as members of groups, not as individuals, and then to treat people well or badly based on their group membership. That’s exactly the opposite of what most of us who grew up in the late 20th century thought was a settled moral fact. (I should note that in her response to me, King said that SPSP didn’t necessarily endorse Kendi’s version of anti-racism, and she pointed out that there were other definitions available.) I can add, in retrospect, a quote from Paul Bloom and his colleagues Christina Starmans and Mark Sheskin. In a 2017 essay in Nature Human Behaviour, they reviewed research on the psychology of fairness and then argued that “humans naturally favour fair distributions, not equal ones, and that when fairness and equality clash, people prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.”

I believe that anti-racism has a place at SPSP, and I said so to King. Let there be speakers, panels, and discussions of this morally controversial and influential idea at our next conference! But to adopt it as the official view and mission of SPSP and then to force us all to say how our work advances it, as a precondition to speaking at the conference? This is wrong for two reasons: First, it elevates anti-racism to be a coequal telos of SPSP, which means that we would no longer rotate around the single axis of excellent science. Every talk would have to be both scientifically sound and anti-racist, even though good science and political activism rarely mix well. Second, it puts pressure on social psychologists — especially younger ones, who most need to present at the conference — to betray their fiduciary duty to the truth and profess outward deference to an ideology that some of them do not privately endorse.

In 1970 the economist Albert O. Hirschman wrote the important book Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Hirschman was analyzing what happens when members of an organization perceive that the quality of an organization, or its value to them, has declined. They then have three alternatives: They can exit the organization, they can voice their objections within the organization, or they can stay loyal to the organization as it currently is by doing nothing or by attacking those who criticize it.

In 2011 I began to perceive a problem in social psychology: Almost all of us were on the left, and I began to see how our political homogeneity damaged the quality of some of our research. I love my field, and I loved SPSP and its conferences, so I raised my voice about it. At the 2011 SPSP conference, I gave a plenary talk on how social psychology was becoming a tribal moral community. I raised my voice again when I joined with five other social psychologists to write a paper in Behavioral and Brain Sciences titled “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science.” That collaboration laid the groundwork for what became Heterodox Academy, once we learned that these problems were happening in many academic fields.

I raised my voice again to write to King and object to the new policy. But soon it will be time for exit. I cannot remain loyal to an organization that is changing its telos and asking its members to violate their quasi-fiduciary duties to the truth. I am especially dubious of the wisdom of making an academic organization more overtly political in its mission, especially in the midst of a raging culture war, when trust in universities is plummeting.

So I’m going to resign from SPSP at the end of this year, when my membership dues run out, if the policy on mandatory statements stays in place for future conventions. I hope that other members will raise their voices.

In the second century CE, Marcus Aurelius wrote this in his Meditations:

Never regard something as doing you good if it makes you betray a trust, or lose your sense of shame, or makes you show hatred, suspicion, ill will, or hypocrisy, or a desire for things best done behind closed doors.

It is timeless advice for professors who strive to live up to their two quasi-fiduciary duties: to our students’ educations, and to the truth.

This essay first appeared as a blog post on the Heterodox Academy website.

==

As always, choose truth over faith.

[arttapiamusicandwords]

[joansblondells]

[compassionmattersmost]

The Enduring Light of Tibetan Buddhism: Lessons for Christian Practitioners

Fostering Compassionate Unity in Christian Practice Introduction I thank God that Tibetan Buddhism still survives. Tibetan Buddhists are some of the most sincere, authentic, and compassionate practitioners of spiritual principles. Their presence is a blessing to the world, offering a guiding light in times of darkness and uncertainty. By exploring their teachings, we can find ways to enhance…

[panspanther]

Hey. Let's not exclude Native American prayers, or Paganism when we speak of spirituality and religion.

Religious Freedom means ALL paths- not just the most popular.

[biblebloodhound]

Good News Is for Everyone (Isaiah 56:1, 6-8)

Strangers, foreigners, immigrants, and anyone different from ourselves, often bring God’s own message to us.

This is what the Lord says: “Maintain justice    and do what is right,for my salvation is close at hand    and my righteousness will soon be revealed…. And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord    to minister to him,to love the name of the Lord,    and to be his servants,all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it    and who hold fast to my covenant—these I will bring to my holy…

[the-polyam-polytheist]

i'm gonna get into drag, get on a little stage, and raise my arms up, spinning and clap on the second beat and dance in the dress of courage Freyja, these things i'll do in your name.

i'm gonna drop into trance, fly up the World Tree, and let my mind loose, searching and open my mouth and let answers pour out Freyja, these things i'll do in your name.

i'm gonna stand on the beach at Coney Island, and sob my grief away, raining and weep for dead men and let my tears run to the sea Freyja, these things i'll do in your name.