Who cares? + Vision

Who cares about loving god?

I do. You should.

I cannot solve the world’s theological problems. But I can contribute my little bit to the world’s theological understanding. This little project, “love god,” is what I can do.

It won’t, by itself, solve our shared global problems. But it is a seed in the effort to solve those grave problems, a small mustard seed that can grow into a large bush, home to many birds and shade for many souls.

And you should care about this too. You have some kind of faith in something (even atheism is a faith in no-god). Ashoka, the Buddhist emperor, taught that we should not denigrate other religions. Rather, we should learn about them. Surely you and I can learn from the likes of Ashoka, Anne Frank, and Rosa Parks, and how they applied their understanding of wisdom to their very difficult situations. And surely you and I can benefit from studying the shared heart of the wisdom they embodied.

Who am I?

Who am I to write about this? Who am I to pursue theological harmony among diverse wisdom traditions? I am nobody, just like you. Made in the image of god, I do my best to understand the image, god, and how to embody my role in this position of nobodiness, image, and god-carrier.

So what do I bring? I bring very little scholarship in the Jewish or Christian tradition. I bring wide reading in multiple traditions. I bring pattern recognition and connection-making. I bring bridge-building.

I bring no affiliation to institutions, no position to protect, no tenure to keep. I bring freedom.

The vision

My vision for this site is a collection of equivalent teachings from diverse wisdom traditions, adding to our shared understanding of the universal practices that are common to effective wisdom traditions.

In the short term, my goal is to publish about one post per week, briefly analyzing a teaching I believe to be common to the world’s wisdom traditions and thus important for humanity as a whole to understand, value, and apply to our shared life.

What I would really like to see is Oneness News – a collective publication covering and discovering the commonalities and differences of world wisdom traditions, piecing together the grand puzzle that is god and human oneness. I don’t have the resources to undertake that project at the moment. But this is what I can do on my own – publish "love god: all the way" as a kind of proto Oneness News, discovering patterns and practices for understanding and embodying god common to diverse wisdom traditions.