http://www.usatoday.com/news/religio...terstitialskip
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| "This is a failure of the pulpit as much as of the pew to be clear about what is and is not compatible with Christianity and belief in salvation only through Christ," Mohler says. Pew says two in three adults believe in or cite an experience with at least one supernatural phenomenon, including: •26% find "spiritual energy" in physical things. •25% believe in astrology. •24% say people will be reborn in this world again and again. •23% say yoga is a "spiritual practice." Mohler calls these "the au courant confusions," attachments to the latest fashionable free-floating beliefs. "One hundred years ago it would have been 'spiritualism.' They wouldn't have known what yoga was but might have been attracted to the 'New Thought' of the time," Mohler says. His former classmate giggles at that. She's an ordained minister in the progressive United Church of Christ and leads the Interfaith Family Project, which meets for weekly worship at a Silver Spring, Md., high school. Jarvis, of Takoma Park, Md., also studies with Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, and finds a spiritual dimension in yoga. "I don't do astrology but my mother, who grew up in Birmingham, Ala., and was a staunch Baptist all her life, looked at her horoscope daily and totally believed it," Jarvis says. Jarvis says her late mother, like 49% of adults in the Pew survey, also had a moment of "religious or spiritual awakening." "My mother feared for years that I was no longer saved, but just two days before she died, she had an epiphany," Jarvis says. "She said she was 'told' in a spiritual experience to put aside all religious and political differences and just love each other. That was her blessing to me and that's what I'm doing." Regina Roman, of Alexandria, Va., calls herself "a very grounded Episcopalian" who's active in her church. But, she says, "I'm also stretching the boundaries of how we are to be here and now in this day, age and culture." She leads pilgrimages to Egypt, New Mexico and Ireland to help travelers discover the truths and visions in Coptic, Native American and Celtic traditions. Roman celebrated the winter solstice with a home ceremony for guests to delight in sun's gifts. "We are all in relationship with the cosmos. We need to honor that," says Roman, who doesn't see herself crossing barriers but rather "coming full circle," with ancient ideas. "People have always mixed religions, either in ignorance or willfully," says Stephen Prothero, director of the Graduate Division of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University. Despite the late Pope John Paul II's warnings to explicitly avoid Buddhist and Hindu practices, Prothero says, "American Catholics are so used to not caring what the official church tells them on birth control, divorce, premarital sex and other points that they don't think they are unCatholic when they believe and do what they please." |
