I’m back after a whirlwind trip to the Boston area and wanting to seriously clear space so I can discern what’s next. But first I have to pay the bills, finish my daughter’s high school applications, grade 26 papers, email the five students with late papers, and write an overdue blog post. If I were a better housekeeper I’d probably include cleaning up the sticky red stuff on the middle refrigerator shelf, though frankly I haven’t written that on my list. I have a sneaking suspicion that as soon as I get the current list crossed off, there will be more on the pile, so I’ve been trying to say no to new requests and plan some down time. I feel like a change is [...]

Friends sometimes ask me, “How’s your amazon ranking?” a question I take as a well-intentioned show of interest in my work, but which I am finding increasingly annoying because it taps into all the ego challenges of promoting a book that I felt called to write and promote. On a spiritual level, I feel my answer should be, “I don’t care,” though, of course, that’s not true. For those who aren’t sure what I’m talking about, amazon ranks its products by how much they are selling compared to other products. Because publishers are very slow to tell authors how many books they have sold, it’s often the only metric a writer has to measure whether or not people are buying their book. What the number [...]

I’ve gotten several requests lately from people who want to write about their spiritual experiences. A recent email asks, “Do you have any advice?” a question so broad that I could write a book to answer it, though I’m going to settle for a blog post. My hope is that this will be helpful to the many people who feel that longing to share their story in print (and that it will spare me the hours it could potentially take to answer each of these requests individually). Here’s my first and main piece of advice: if you feel called to write, start writing. I first started feeling the inner-nudge to write while I was working for a non-profit about 19 years ago. I started typing [...]

screen shot onlyAs some of you may have seen, this week I have an article on the Huffington Post, which has so far gotten nearly 600 comments, most of them negative, some vitriolic. It’s been interesting watching the comments pile up faster than I can read them, let alone respond. Mostly they haven’t bothered me because it is clear that the anger people feel toward religion has very little to do with me, though I am trying to understand it. I don’t have a clear analysis yet, just a sense that what my writing tries to do—help people get past their negative stereotypes of God and find a mature connection to the Divine that’s not based on coercion—is needed more than I realized, not to force [...]