Pet cemeteries reprised: [O]wners of all kinds of domestic animals have become more likely to believe in a pet afterlife: A new analysis published in the journal Antiquity, examining the history of pet cemeteries in Newcastle and London over 100 years from 1881, found an increase in the proportion of graves that reference the animals’ immortal ( Read more... )

I was given pause during reading a very negative review of 12 Years A Slave, which, among other things, suggested that it registered a major failure to demonstrate 'the capacity for spiritual sustenance, inherited from the legacy of slavery and survival'.

(Which might be because that was not the story it was telling, perhaps.)

(But that was not my ( Read more... )

I haven't been to St James Piccadilly for a while - they don't seem to be doing as many evening concerts as they used to, or maybe I exaggerate the frequency with which we ever went to concerts there.

It's Wren! It has Grinling Gibbons carvings!

Both William Blake and Lord Chesterfield were baptised there! Along with a whole array of other famous ( Read more... )

This emerged in a comment to this post by
( Read more... )

It's hard to imagine how such disparate personalities got on for long enough to create a literary movement.

This sentence comes from a review in the London Review of Books on a book about the Beats and India.

Except it's one of those lines that could be applied in many different circumstance, to pretty much any literary or artistic (and come to ( Read more... )

This story, A H Jacobs on a spiritual journey I began a year ago. My quest has been this: to live the ultimate biblical life. Or, more precisely, to follow the Bible as literally as possible reminded me an awful lot of that clueless bloke who decided to 'live as a woman' for a week, going solely, as far as one could see, on the basis of a rather ( Read more... )

Blake Morrison investigates the rise of bibliotherapy: 'the best kind of help doesn't necessarily come by way of self-help books. Nor are the books which make us feel good usually feelgood books'.

And on the development of the inner life, Oliver Burkeman, who is rather variable, on non-deistic spirituality.

Craig Raine on memory in literature.

( Read more... )

Further to all the fascinating comments on yesterday's post, I think this that I posted some while back covers most of the bases as regards my own position.

Except that I forgot to mention the almost certainly counter-productive interventions of a Holy Roller schoolmate (I can hardly say friend), whom I also encountered through various Free Church ( Read more... )

This has been generated by an assortment of things going on hither and yon via my flist and elsewhere.

I am an atheist* myself, but I know that many of you who read this are believers in one or another spiritual tradition (Christians of various strands, Jewish, Buddhist, Pagan... just off the top of my head). I was going to do a poll, just out of ( Read more... )

I have been given much to think by this discussion over in ajhalluk's lj.

I was brought up a very practising Methodist and my family were very involved with the local church (I also went - for reasons of proximity - to a C of E primary school): my grandfather was a local preacher, my grandmother was involved with all sorts of activites like the Women's ( Read more... )