COFFEE BREAK 96

+ updated at 4:04pm EST.

+ Thanks to the Witherspoon Society, we can discover that Presbyterian blogger John Shuck wrote a beautiful Advent message for his church newsletter.  Clearly, Presbyterian blogger Viola Larson doesn't think so as her latest post makes clear.  John finds the criticism childish.  I think there is plenty of common ground the two can walk on together if they choose to find it. 

3:42pm update: John Shuck's message and another great message about the Second Coming of Christ by Presbyterian minister Bruce Gillette can be found at the Witherspoon page, "Entering Advent".

The common ground of all spirituality is found in the Perennial Philosophy which is summarized well by Aldous Huxley in an introduction he wrote for a translation of The Bhagavid-Gita about 70 years ago.  He wrote an excellent anthology called The Perennial Philosophy. 

Alan Watts said that all of our religions offer the Perennial Philosophy but imperfectly and incompletely.  We can often find what we are missing by seeking the wisdom of other traditions.  In Myth and Ritual in Christianity, he writes in a comprehensive and appealing manner that the Catholic Christianity of the Middle Ages came close to capturing the essence of the Perennial Philosophy.

I believe strongly that all of our wisdom traditions (as Huston Smith likes to call them) have found the amazing grace God offers humanity.  We use different symbols and stories to express our beliefs and values but there is an underlying unity.  Two websites I have found express this beautifully: Peter Russel's THE CHURCH OF I AM and Gary L. Beckwith's THE TEN TEACHINGS OF ALL RELIGIONS. 

The Charter for Compassion is a huge effort to find common ground recently begun due to the dedication of Karen Armstrong, a renowned scholar of religion.  I invite you to affirm this charter as I have and over 27,000 others.
 
+ A great place to buy coffee these days is your local church because many churches sell Equal Exchange Coffee and Tea and other products which are fairly traded.

+ I'm searching for a device to convert thousands of slides to digital photos.  My grandfather Wilde, my father and father-in-law and I took a lot of pictures over the past 60 years or so.  I think I found one at a reasonable price which is liked by a lot of customers.  It's the Epson Perfection V300 Photo Flatbed Scanner.

+ It's Advent. Repent.  IOW make some changes in your life which bring you closer to God.