Friday, January 31, 2014

Feb. 1 Tip: Register Now for Practicing Compassion

Register Now for Practicing Compassion led by Vanessa Hurst

(The February 1 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

Practicing Compassion

 We are each called by the Sacred to live compassionately; and, life gives us many opportunities to choose between a mindful response or a knee-jerk reaction. During this 3-part experience you will be invited to learn and practice the pathways to compassion: the commitment to cause no harm, conscious engagement with others and all of creation and non-attachment through acceptance of the world as it is without judgment.

Dates & Time: Thursdays, February 6, 13 and 20 from 7-8:30 PM
Facilitator: Vanessa Hurst
Location: Brescia Hall, 3105 Lexington Road
Cost: $45 for entire series
To reserve a spot call 502-896-3945

The Angela Merici Center for Spirituality
3105 Lexington Road, Louisville, KY 40206
502-896-3945

www.amcspirituality.org | AMC@ursulineslou.org

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Jan 31 Tip: On Merton's 99th birthday, Watch Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton

On Merton's 99th birthday, Watch Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton 

(The January 31 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.pbs.org/programs/soul-searching/

Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Mertonexamines the life of a modern American monk considered one of the great spiritual thinkers of the 20th century. It was a remarkably rich life and has prompted the millions who read Merton to characterize him as part Augustine, part Emerson and part Gandhi.
As the son of artists, Thomas Merton grew up in the 1920s and 1930s given to avant-garde intellectual pursuits. This led him to briefly embrace communism, which he put aside for Catholicism which in turn catapulted him to a strictly cloistered life in a rural Kentucky monastery. The writings that flowed from his monastic cell over the next 27 years examined spirituality (of the west and east), the Cold War, the civil rights movement and the challenges for the individual in the post-modern world. In short, Merton's writing took on many of the struggles of the 20th and 21st century. His thinking brought him praise, censure and the reputation as one of the most influential writers of his time. Thomas Merton died by accidental electrocution while traveling in Asia but remains one of the most widely read and written about spiritual figures of the modern era.
Award-winning producer Morgan Atkinson spent years researching Merton's work, as well as interviewing Merton's friends, scholars and authorities on the spiritual life. Atkinson's cameras reveal life at the Merton's home at the Abbey of Gethsemani, as well as his path through New York City, the Redwoods Monastery in California and New Mexico's Christ in the Desert Monastery. In bringing to life Merton's years as a monk, this deeply considered film casts a bright light on the struggles and fruits of his spiritual search.


Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Jan 30 Tip: Listen to "A skeptic takes a tour of self help's "promise land"

From NPR: Listen to "A skeptic takes a tour of self help's "promise land"

(The January 30 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/22/264878772/skeptic-takes-a-tour-of-self-helps-promise-land?sc=17&f=13

A lot of self-help books have simple formulas. They promise 30 days or 10 easy steps to having thinner thighs, landing a spouse, having a great sex life, starting a new life after divorce, climbing the corporate ladder while dressed for success, and, of course, finding inner peace. And while many swear by the power of their favorite self-help philosophy, there are still a lot of skeptics....

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Jan 29 Tip: As work gets more complex, 6 rules to simplify

As Work Gets More Complex, 6 Rules to Simplify

(The January 29 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.ted.com/talks/yves_morieux_as_work_gets_more_complex_6_rules_to_simplify.html?utm_source=email&source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ios-share

Why do people feel so miserable and disengaged at work? Because today's businesses are increasingly and dizzyingly complex -- and traditional pillars of management are obsolete, says Yves Morieux. So, he says, it falls to individual employees to navigate the rabbit's warren of interdependencies. In this energetic talk, Morieux offers six rules for "smart simplicity." (Rule One: Understand what your colleagues actually do.)
BCG's Yves Morieux researches how corporations can adapt to a modern and complex business landscape.

Monday, January 27, 2014

Jan 28 Tip: Listen to "A Matter of Conscience"

Listen to "A Matter of Conscience" from the radio program "To the Best of Our Knowledge"

(The January 28 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://podcast.wpr.org/tbk/tbk140119a.mp3

Why the Vietnam Era was a Matter of Conscience Resisting the Draft - Coleman; Conscientious Objectors - Jim Fleming & Friends; Bill Ayers on the Weather Underground; What It Is Like To Go To War - Karl Marlantes; Dissent Then & Now - Tim O'Brien.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Jan 27 Tip: Watch a Short Video and Learn why the US Military Budget has Ballooned Since World War II

From the NY Times: Learn why the US Military Budget has Ballooned Since World War II

(The January 27 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000002595525/think-back-the-military-budget.html

United States military spending has ballooned since World War II, although Americans have historically been reluctant to go to war. The Times’s Sam Tanenhaus explains why.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Jan 26 Tip: Learn about the Economics of Well Being

From "To the Best of Our Knowledge" Learn about The Economics of Well Being"

(The January 26 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://podcast.wpr.org/tbk/tbk130616a.mp3

five ways of spending money that are most likely to yield lasting happiness. Neil Irwin on Central Bankers; Alternative Currencies; Elizabeth Dunn on Happy Money; Economics of happiness; Rebecca Ryan on "Re-Generation".




Friday, January 24, 2014

Jan 25 Tip: From the NY Times: Watch a short video of The "Read Around" with Poet Nikki Giovanni

From the NY Times: Watch a short video of The "Read Around" with Poet Nikki Giovanni

(The January 25 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.nytimes.com/video/books/100000002632476/the-read-around-nikki-giovanni.html


“Poetry prevents everybody from feeling lonely,” says Nikki Giovanni. Her latest book, “Chasing Utopia,” is a collection of poetry, recipes and short stories.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Jan 24 Tip: Buddhist Pema Chodron on How Troublemakers Show Us Where We're Stuck

Buddhist Pema Chodron on How Troublemakers Show Us Where We're Stuck

(The January 24 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.shambhala.com/authors/a-f-1/pema-chodron.html

Those who give us a hard time, who are difficult to be around or who constantly blow our cover, are the very ones who show us where we we’re stuck. The great meditation master Atisha always traveled with his belligerent Bengali tea-boy because it kept him honest. Without his ill-tempered servant to test him, he might have been able to deceive himself about his degree of equanimity. Troublemakers up the ante: if we can practice patience with them, we can practice it with anyone. 

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Jan 23 Tip: Watch a short video featuring Ram Dass on "Suffering and Karma"

Watch a short video featuring Ram Dass on "Suffering and Karma"

(The January 23 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV9cXKHkX34&feature=em-subs_digest-ctrl-vrecs

The great spiritual leader Ram Dass talks about the meaning of suffering and how to bear with it.

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

jan 22 Tip: Listen to the "This I Believe" Essay by Dianne Aprile

Listen to the "This I Believe" Essay by Dianne Aprile on "Silence"

(The January 22 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://thisibelieve.org/essay/144206/

I believe in silence. In its power and its persuasion.
I believe that the act of saying nothing often—no, usually—speaks louder than words ever could.
Monks know this. From Thich Nhat Hanh to Thomas Merton to the Dalai Lama, monks know and understand the deeply felt significance of the unspoken.
Poets know it, too. E. E. Cummings said: Silence is a looking bird. Not a singing bird. A looking bird. A bird observing, noticing, listening. Being. Here. Now.
But so do we ordinary women and men know the profound power of silence. Intuitively, we know it.
Consider the wordless communication between mother and newborn at her breast. Or the tacit tête-à-tête that exists in a hospital room where the dying lies in bed and the friend sits, silent, at her side.
I believe in the authority of silence.
What if governments, rather than reacting with statements and decrees, observed silence—briefly but routinely—at times of crisis? What if we, the citizens, stopped to quietly reflect on the day’s news, rather than jumping into the fray with rushed judgments and verbal crossfire?
Silence has its own eloquence.
Think of the times you dissolved a disagreement by not giving expression to the negative emotions it stirred in you.
I believe silence is a way of affirming life, even in a democracy—which, at its heart, is a public conversation. Let’s not forget: conversation implies alternating patterns of listening and talking—equal parts silence and speech.
Imagine an election campaign where no one spoke unless they had something to say. Where silence was imposed for, oh, a calming few minutes after a debate or a misspoken word—so we could meditate on what was said (and not said) before grumbling hordes of commentators burst forth to tell us what we heard.
Think of silence in music, the pause—that empty moment, a bridge between what came before and what is to come. A moment of awareness of the present, with a nod to the past and an ear turned to the future.
Silence, Mary Oliver says, gives poetry its rhythm and music. So too our lives need silence—patches of nothingness, ellipses of emptiness, to inform the drumbeat of our days. And of our duties.
Think of the heroes and movements that used silence to change the world. Silence, as in the refusal to act in bad faith, to follow immoral orders, to go along with wars and poverty and discrimination and the earth’s destruction.
I believe in silence, in its yearning for wholeness, its desire to close the breach, its urge to unite what’s come asunder.
Silence too often gets a bad rap. It’s not apathy or surrender. It’s not looking the other way.
Likewise, speaking is not necessarily speaking out. Sometimes words get in the way of reconciliation. They convey noise, not knowledge.
Imagine allowing conflict to settle, rather than engaging it—ratcheting up a level, and a level, and a level. Think of the Dalai Lama’s soundless smile, Gandhi’s quiet walk, Martin Luther King’s carefully placed pauses in his stirring orations. Think of anti-war protests where there were songs and speeches, and think of those conducted wholly in silence.
Imagine a nation that listened rather than blogged and posted. A nation that, in times of turmoil, gave itself permission to be still, to not speak, not act—until all that was unspoken was given time and space to make its case, to be taken into account.
Imagine that.
“Silence is never really silent,” the composer John Cage said.
This I believe.
Dianne Aprile is the author and editor of creative nonfiction books. A former journalist and jazz-club co-owner, she is the recipient of fellowships from Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and Washington state’s Artist Trust. Aprile is a member of the nonfiction faculty of Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in writing program. Her latest collaborative project, The Book, combines fine-art photographs by Julius Friedman with writers’ texts.
Independently produced by Dan Gediman for This I Believe, Inc.

Monday, January 20, 2014

Jan 21 Tip: Register now for the "Practicing Compassion" Series with Vanessa Hurst

Register now for the "Practicing Compassion" Series with Vanessa Hurst

(The January 21 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

Practicing Compassion

 We are each called by the Sacred to live compassionately; and, life gives us many opportunities to choose between a mindful response or a knee-jerk reaction. During this 3-part experience you will be invited to learn and practice the pathways to compassion: the commitment to cause no harm, conscious engagement with others and all of creation and non-attachment through acceptance of the world as it is without judgment.

Dates & Time: Thursdays, February 6, 13 and 20 from 7-8:30 PM
Facilitator: Vanessa Hurst
Location: Brescia Hall, 3105 Lexington Road
Cost: $45 for entire series
To reserve a spot call 502-896-3945

The Angela Merici Center for Spirituality
3105 Lexington Road, Louisville, KY 40206
502-896-3945
www.amcspirituality.org | AMC@ursulineslou.org

Sunday, January 19, 2014

Jan 20 Tip: Explore the speeches of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Explore the speeches of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

(The January 20 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.npr.org/news/specials/march40th/speeches.html

The Rev. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream Speech" marked the highlight of the 1963 March on Washington. Explore NPR coverage of some of the civil rights leader's other speeches and sermons.




Saturday, January 18, 2014

Jan 19 Tip: Attend today's "Keepers of the Dream" Martin Luther King memorial event

Jan 19 Tip: Attend today's "Keepers of the Dream" Martin Luther King memorial event

(The January 19 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

Interfaith Paths to Peace joins our friends at

The Kentucky Center ArtsReach,
Louisville Metro Government, and
River City Drum Corps
in inviting you to:

Keepers of the Dream
A Community Arts Celebration of
The Vision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sunday, January 19 at 5 pm
Kentucky Center-Whitney Hall
501 West Main Street in Louisville

4-4:45 Pre-Show Activities
In the Main Lobby

Free and Open to the Public

The event will include presentation of
The Freedom Award
By Mayor Greg Fischer and
Dr. Sandra E. Brooks of Norton Healthcare


Reception following the program


Jan 18 Tip: Children's novel is a lifeline for a soldier at war

From CBS: Children's novel is a lifeline for a soldier at war

(The January 18 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/childrens-novel-a-lifeline-for-american-soldier-at-war/

A used paperback of "Bridge to Terabithia" was sent to Corporal Trent Reedy in Afghanistan. "CBS This Morning contributor Lee Woodruff reports on how the book changed the lives of Reedy, the author and a young Afghan girl.


Friday, January 17, 2014

Jan 17 Tip: Attend Sunday's Penny Sisto Exhibit Opening and Talk on "Art as Healer" 2:30-5:30 pm

Attend Sunday's Penny Sisto Exhibit Opening and Talk on "Art as Healer" 2:30-5:30 pm

(The January 17 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

Please join us for a new exhibit of fiber art by artist Penny Sisto on Sunday, January 19 from 2:30-5:30 pm. At around 3:30 pm, Penny will offer a brief gallery talk on "Art as Healer." There will be about 15 pieces, many done in 2014!!

St. Paul's Episcopal Church 

http://www.pennysisto.com/ 

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Jan 16 Tip: Learn aabout Louisville's Committee on Foreign Relations

Learn about Louisville's Committee on Foreign Relations

(The January 16 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://louisvillecommittee.org/

The mission of the Louisville Committee on Foreign Relations is to promote a high-level, non-partisan dialogue on American foreign policy and foreign affairs in the Louisville metropolitan region. The LCFR seeks to promote a more informed foreign policy by bridging the divide between broader public opinion and the established foreign policy making community.


Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Jan 15 Tip: View a series of photos of beautiful labyrinths from around the world

View a series of photos of beautiful labyrinths from around the world

(The January 15 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/13/labyrinths-photos_n_4326303.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

Sometimes getting lost is the best way to be found.
Labyrinths have been part of human civilization since antiquity, often serving a spiritual or meditative purpose. There are a few different types, but the classical labyrinth usually consists of a single pathway that loops back and forth to form seven circuits, bounded by eight walls, that surround the center.
Some Christians have incorporated walking labyrinths into the spiritual discipline of the community. The Chartres Cathedral has a labyrinth in the floor of the church where it serves as a tool for contemplation, meditation, and prayer.
Check out these labyrinths from around the world.

Monday, January 13, 2014

Jan 14 Tip: Make your reservation today for Thursday's luncheon program on "Diverting the School to Prison Pipeline."

Make your reservation today for Thursday's luncheon program on "Diverting the School to Prison Pipeline."

(The January 14 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

Diverting the "School to Prison Pipeline"
Rebecca Ballard DiLoreto, Litigation Director, Children's Law Center

At the Rudyard Kipling in Old Louisville.  Buffet lunch at 11:30.  Presentation at noon.  $7.  

Call Cathy Ford at 458-1223 for a reservation
 by 5 pm on Tuesday, January 14.

Significant gaps in achievement and graduation rates exist for students of color and students with disabilities in the Jefferson County Public Schools.  Rebecca DiLoreto will discuss the role that school district policies such as discipline practices and alternative schools can play in either feeding, or diverting, the "school to prison pipeline."  She will talk about the work of the Children's Law Center protecting the rights of at-risk youth in Jefferson County - and the importance of community involvement if we hope to change our public schools for the benefit of all students.
Join us for some cake with Ken and Shiela Pyle who has hosted the TTL series at the Rud for 20 years!

At the Rudyard Kipling in Old Louisville.  Buffet lunch at 11:30.  Presentation at noon.  $7.  Call Cathy Ford at 458-1223 for a reservation by 5 pm on Tuesday, January 14


Sunday, January 12, 2014

Jan 13 Tip: Marilynne Robinson and Marcelo Gleiser on "The Mystery We Are"

From "On Being" Marilynne Robinson and Marcelo Gleiser on "The Mystery We Are"

(The January 13 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.onbeing.org/program/the-mystery-we-are/4910

What do a fiction writer and an astrophysicist have in common? Marilynne Robinson and Marcelo Gleiser connect the dots between the cosmos, our minds, and all the ways we discover the story of where we came from. 

Jan 12 Tip: View Maysoon Zayid's TED Talk: I got 99 problems... palsy is just one

View Maysoon Zayid's TED Talk: I got 99 problems... palsy is just one

(The January 12 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.ted.com/talks/maysoon_zayid_i_got_99_problems_palsy_is_just_one.html?utm_source=email&source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ios-share

"I have cerebral palsy. I shake all the time," Maysoon Zayid announces at the beginning of this exhilarating, hilarious talk. (Really, it's hilarious.) "I'm like Shakira meets Muhammad Ali." With grace and wit, the Arab-American comedian takes us on a whistle-stop tour of her adventures as an actress, stand-up comic, philanthropist and advocate for the disabled.
Writer, actor, comedian, Maysoon Zayid is the co-founder of the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival

Friday, January 10, 2014

Jan 11 Tip:A Critic Tours 'Echo Spring,' Home Of Beloved Boozy Writers

A Critic Tours 'Echo Spring,' Home Of Beloved Boozy Writers

(The January 11 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/03/259392156/a-critic-tours-echo-spring-home-of-beloved-boozy-writers?sc=17&f=1008

It's the quintessential "dog bites man" story. I'm talking about a new book I just read about a group of famous writers who — get this — drank too much! I know, right? That's pretty much the equivalent of saying I just read a book about a group of famous writers who used commas in their sentences.
It's that very ho-hum quality of the link between alcohol and writing, however, that got critic Olivia Laing interested in the subject. Laing is the deputy books editor for the British newspaper The Observer, and, as she tells us, she grew up in a household damaged by alcoholism. She's haunted by the mystery of what causes someone to become an alcoholic and, while Laing gives the standard medical explanations their due, she's drawn to the "more resonant" commentaries of writers who were themselves addicted to liquor. By way of illustration, she quotes Charles Baudelaire, who said of Edgar Allan Poe that alcohol had become a weapon "to kill something inside himself, a worm that would not die."
Laing names her book The Trip to Echo Spring after a line from Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof where the drunken character Brick announces that he's "takin' a little short trip to Echo Spring." It's a poetic way of saying that he's walking over to the liquor cabinet.
i
Williams is, naturally, one of the writers she focuses on here, along with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver. Laing acknowledges that there were plenty of literary women she could have tossed in, but says their stories hit too close to home (a connection she explains in the autobiographical sections of her book). It's clear after the first few pages of The Trip to Echo Spring that the reason Laing chose this particular group of male writers is because she loves them and their work. Her exquisite readings of Hemingway's short story "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and Cheever's short story "The Swimmer" will make you want to reread those anthologized chestnuts and delve into Carver's and Berryman's perhaps less familiar poetry.
As so many visiting Brits before her have done, Laing structures her book as a road trip. Most of her alcoholic subjects were restless souls, too, and so by train, plane and automobile, Laing traces their wanderings from New York City (where a woozy Tennessee Williams died in a hotel room near the theater district after choking on a plastic bottle cap) all the way to the Pacific Northwest. There, Laing suggests, a young Raymond Carver drank boilermakers after his daily shifts as a hospital janitor to choke back his bitterness and "a sense of spoiling time." Laing passes through North Carolina but doesn't stop at the Asheville hotel where, in 1935, Fitzgerald wrestled with his "crack-up" and gamely convinced himself that he was on the wagon because beer didn't count as alcohol (even though he was reportedly consuming up to 20 bottles of beer a day). Laing lingers longest in New Orleans and Key West, the latter a home to both Hemingway and Williams. After taking a day cruise to snorkel, she reflects on the fact that so many of her beloved boozy writers seem transfixed not only with drowning their sorrows in alcohol, but also by the suicidal "dream of letting go into water."
Laing, wisely, doesn't reach any one-size-fits-all conclusions about the bond between the pen and the bottle. Some of her writers drink, it seems, to quell panic and self-disgust; others as a stimulant; others for who-knows-what reason. And, though she's a marvelous writer herself, Laing sticks to her original premise that alcoholic writers are the most eloquent chroniclers of their own addiction. In that spirit then, I'll let poet John Berryman have the last word on the awful alliance between drinking and writing. This is a stanza that Laing quotes from Berryman's "Dream Songs":
Hunger was constitutional with him, wine, cigarettes, liquor, need need needUntil he went to pieces.The pieces sat up & wrote.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Jan 10 Tip: Read about the art and history of yoga


From the NY Times: ‘Yoga: The Art of Transformation’ 

(The January 10 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)


The origins of the ideas and actions we call yoga are obscure, and the visual history all but unstudied. The Sackler show is the first major art survey in the United States to tackle the subject. There is evidence that religious ascetics were wandering North India as early as the fifth century B.C., practicing meditation and breath control in pursuit of mind-over-matter transcendence. By the second century A.D. their methods had long since been absorbed into Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, and were codified in the Yoga Sutras, a philosophical treatise that doubled as a user’s manual and is attributed to a sage named Patanjali.

(Read more...)

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Jan 9 Tip: Tonight at Carmichaels: Inhabiting Eden : Christians, the Bible, and the Ecological Crisis

Tonight at Carmichaels: Patricia Tull on her new book, Inhabiting Eden : Christians, the Bible, and the Ecological Crisis

On Thursday, January 9 at 5:30 pm, Carmichael's Bookstore welcomes Patricia Tull, Professor Emerita of Old Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, for a discussion of her new book Inhabiting Eden : Christians, the Bible, and the Ecological Crisis. In this thoughtful study, Tull looks to the Bible for what it can tell us about our relationships not just to the earth itself, but also to plant and animal life, to each other, and to our Creator.

Join us at Carmichaels Bookstore, 2720 Frankfort Avenue in Louisville.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Jan 8: Robert Indiana: Beyond Love

Robert Indiana: Beyond Love

(The January 8 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/RobertIndiana?gclid=CK36q7Pk6bsCFTJo7AodOkMApQ

Robert Indiana (b. Robert Clark, 1928) first emerged on the wave of Pop Art that engulfed the art world in the early 1960s. Bold and visually dazzling, his work embraced the vocabulary of highway signs and roadside entertainments that were commonplace in post war America. Presciently, he used words to explore themes of American identity, racial injustice, and the illusion and disillusion of love. 

The appearance in 1966 of what became his signature image, LOVE, and its subsequent proliferation on unauthorized products, eclipsed the public’s understanding of the emotional poignancy and symbolic complexity of his art. This retrospective reveals an artist whose work, far from being unabashedly optimistic and affirmative, addresses the most fundamental issues facing humanity—love, death, sin, and forgiveness—giving new meaning to our understanding of the ambiguities of the American Dream and the plight of the individual in a pluralistic society.



Monday, January 6, 2014

January 7 Tip: View Louisville "Epiphanies" on Metro TV

View Louisville "Epiphanies" on Metro TV

(The January 7 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.louisvilleky.gov/MetroTV/

Epiphanies*
Powerful and Transformative Stories
Of People You Know

FEATURING

John Rosenberg
John Y. Brown III
Ambassador Shabaz

Moderated by Don Vish

With music by John Gage


Jan 6 Tip: Photographing Spiritual Experience

From the NY Times: Photographing Spiritual Experience

(The January 6 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/photographing-spiritual-experience/?hp

When the Lens blog made its debut in 2009, the newspaper industry was in free fall, the outlets for serious photojournalism rapidly disappearing. “There was a need to help promote photographers and photography in whatever way possible,” said James Estrin, the blog’s co-founder. “We wanted to write about the photographers; photos don’t happen by themselves.”
Wanting more than an online gallery, he helped turn Lens into a showcase for photographers pursuing projects from the serious to the silly.
Today we bring my friend Jim out from behind the curtain to feature his photography. Having worked many, many 12-hour days with him, I can say firsthand that James Estrin’s photos definitely don’t happen by themselves. Beginning Jan. 7, a collection of his work documenting human spirituality will be exhibited in a solo show at the 92nd Street Y on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. It is a subject to which he has repeatedly returned since he started at The Times in 1987, and encompasses everything from photos at churches and synagogues to prison sweat lodges and childbirth suites.
While some of the worst atrocities in history have been committed by people warring over religion, Jim hunts for the commonalities among faiths.
Still, photographing spirituality is a tricky business.

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Jan 5 Tip: The Power to Change Your Brain for the Better

From Sounds True: The Power to Change Your Brain for the Better

(The January 5 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace

http://www.soundstrue.com/weeklywisdom/?source=tami-simon&p=1913&category=PP&version=full

Neuropsychologist Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain, has spent over a decade studying how we can consciously harness our brain’s natural malleability, or “neuroplasticity,” to deepen our experience of happiness and joy. In this selection from his audio program Self-Directed Brain Change, Dr. Hanson discusses some of the techniques he has used personally and has taught to thousands of people to help us tap into the life-changing power hidden in seemingly ordinary moments. With these methods, we can consciously work with the positive experiences in our lives to create neural structures that support and sustain our overall well-being.

Friday, January 3, 2014

jan 4 TiP: Learn to edit your story... and mend your life

Learn to edit your story... and mend your life

(The January 4 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/03/revising.aspx

Thanks to Lora Haynes for sharing this

University of Virginia psychologist Timothy D. Wilson, PhD, is fascinated by the stories people tell themselves to make sense of the world. Those personal narratives, he says, can make the difference between living a healthy, productive life—or not.
But the question is: How can we alter those narratives to enact positive, lasting change?
Wilson—co-author of the bestselling textbook Social Psychology, now in its seventh edition—has some answers. In his 2011 book "Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change," Wilson takes aim at a number of conventional behavior-change programs, from abstinence-only sex education to Critical Incident Stress Debriefing, which aims to prevent post-traumatic stress disorder after distressing events. Too often, such programs are implemented before they've been adequately tested, he says, and many don't work as intended.
In their place, he offers a surprisingly simple approach for behavior change. Wilson calls this process "story editing," and he recently spoke with the Monitor about how it can change lives for the better.
In your book, you describe numerous social programs that turned out to do more harm than good. Can you give an example?
There are several to choose from. One of the best examples is the Scared Straight program, in which at-risk teens are taken to prisons and harangued by hardened inmates to avoid a life of crime. Many communities adopted this program before it was properly tested. It turns out that not only do Scared Straight programs not work, they backfire: Teens who participate are more likely to commit crimes than a randomly assigned control group of kids who do not participate. The kids seem to be getting the message that they must be at risk of becoming criminals if convicts are going to such extreme measures to talk them out of it. And indeed, in a cheating study I did with college students, I found that strong external threats at one point in time can actually increase interest in a forbidden activity at a later point in time (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1982).
You suggest that behavior change by "story editing" is a better way forward. What is story editing and how does it work?
The idea is that if we want to change people's behaviors, we need to try to get inside their heads and understand how they see the world—the stories and narratives they tell themselves about who they are and why they do what they do. Social and clinical psychologists have known this for decades. The surprising part is that it may be easier than we thought to get people to edit their stories in ways that lead to sustained changes in behavior.
How so? Can you describe the techniques involved?
There are three general approaches. I call the first "story prompting," whereby people are given information that prompts them to change the way they view themselves and the causes of their behavior. An example is a study I did with college students many years ago (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1982). The participants were first-year students who weren't doing well academically. As part of what they thought was a survey, they read information suggesting that many college students do poorly at first but improve over time. We also showed the students videotaped interviews of juniors and seniors who reinforced this message. In other words, we prompted students to reinterpret their academic problems from a belief that they couldn't cut it in college to the view that they simply needed to learn the ropes. The students who got this prompt—compared to a control group that didn't—got better grades the next year and were less likely to drop out.
The second approach involves writing exercises that people can do on their own to revise their narratives. For example, James Pennebaker, at the University of Texas, has pioneered an expressive writing technique that helps people recover from past traumas by helping them reframe and reinterpret those events. Ethan Kross, at the University of Michigan, and Ozlem Ayduk, at the University of California, Berkeley, have also demonstrated that writing about negative events is helpful, particularly if people take a third-person perspective on those events and think about why they occurred.
The third approach is the "do good, be good" method. It capitalizes on the tried-and-true psychological principle that our attitudes and beliefs often follow from our behaviors, rather than precede them. As Kurt Vonnegut famously wrote, "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." People who do volunteer work, for example, often change their narratives of who they are, coming to view themselves as caring, helpful people. Well-designed studies have shown that teen girls who participate in community service programs do better in school and are less likely to become pregnant.
Was there an "aha moment" when you realized how effective the story-editing approach is?
There was such a moment early in my career when I did the academic performance intervention with first-year college students. We included some short-term measures in that study that worked as we'd predicted: The students who got the intervention did better on sample items from the Graduate Record Examination. This was nice but not all that surprising; after all, the students had just gotten the story-editing prompt. We included the long-term measures, grades over the next year and dropout rates as kind of a lark, not really believing that our intervention would change behavior over the long run. I'll never forget the moment I got the results showing it did—all from attending a session that lasted about 30 minutes.
In the book, you describe how story editing can tackle some major social problems such as child abuse, substance abuse and racial prejudice. Can you talk about that?
These problems have multiple causes, of course, and are notoriously hard to solve. But sometimes a little story editing goes a long way. One of my favorite examples is the research of Daphne Bugental, [a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara] who works with parents at risk of abusing their children. One of the most common approaches to preventing child abuse, the Healthy Families America program, involves screening parents with newborns before they leave the hospital. Those deemed at risk for child abuse are given counseling and home visits. But studies that have randomly assigned parents to take part in the program or to an untreated control group have found that the intervention has no effect on the likelihood that the parents will abuse their children. Bugental and her colleagues added a seemingly small story-editing intervention to the home visits. The prompt involved getting parents to reinterpret why their babies were cranky or difficult. Often, the parents would blame their babies (for instance, "He's trying to provoke me."). The home visitor would ask parents if they could think of any other reasons, prompting them to attribute their babies' behavior to situational factors that were easy to solve (such as, "Maybe I didn't burp him enough."). These story prompts had a dramatic effect. Among both a control group and those who participated in the traditional Healthy Families America program, about 24 percent of the parents physically abused their children. In the group that got the story prompt, this percentage dropped to 4 percent.
How do the story-editing strategies you've described differ from what goes on in psychotherapy?
Story editing is well known to psychotherapists; indeed, it is what good therapists do. Various therapeutic techniques approach it a little differently, but I think the goal is the same. But the kind of story editing I discuss differs from psychotherapy. For one thing, most of the interventions social psychologists have devised are used with general populations, not just those who have reached the point where they're seeking mental-health services. We try to catch people when they are at a narrative fork in the road, so that they can be directed down the healthier path before their problems become severe. Also, the story-editing techniques I discuss address a wide range of behaviors in addition to personal adjustment problems. They have been used to close the achievement gap in education, reduce stereotyping and prejudice, and to get young people to drink less. Parents can also use these techniques to help their kids develop healthy narratives.
How are such findings changing the field?
This is an exciting time in social psychology. Since its inception, the field has focused largely on developing basic knowledge about human cognition, motivation, affect and behavior, primarily by conducting laboratory studies. More and more, however, social psychologists are translating this basic theoretical knowledge into interventions that have powerful effects in the real world. Many of these interventions involve story editing, in that they change people's self-views in ways that have long-term beneficial consequences. We need to keep doing the basic research, but it is exciting to see many of these findings turned into interventions that work.

Kirsten Weir is a writer in Minneapolis.


Thursday, January 2, 2014

Jan 3 Tip: Photographing Hiroshima, Fukushima & everything in between

Photographing Hiroshima, Fukushima & everything in between

(The January 3 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/photographing-hiroshima-fukushima-and-everything-in-between/

Kikujiro Fukushima’s life in photography took off when he promised to avenge the Hiroshima bombing. It was 1952, and Mr. Fukushima — a watchmaker, volunteer social worker and photographer — met Sugimatsu Nakamura, a 43-year-old fisherman, who was gravely ill from the atomic bomb’s effects.
“For the first two years I was too timid to photograph him,” Mr. Fukushimatold me a few weeks ago. “But one day, he got on his knees, crying, and begged me.”
“Fukushima, can you please take revenge on the atomic bomb?”
“Yes, but how?”
“Take pictures of my pain and let the world know how terrible it is.”
Mr. Nakamura was not only angry about the bombing, but also with the Japanese government, which refused to provide proper care for its victims. Mr. Fukushima understood this well — he had been in the Japanese military, stationed in Hiroshima until one week before the bombing, when he was transferred to prepare for a suicide mission. Most of his comrades who stayed behind were killed.
Mr. Nakamura died in 1967, but the documentary filmmaker Saburo Hasegawa believes that the vow Mr. Fukushima made to the ailing fisherman guided his subsequent career, in which he photographed individuals fighting social injustice. During the social upheaval of the 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Fukushima photographed student and feminist movements, antiwar protests and industrial pollution. He even infiltrated Japan’s Self-Defense Forces by telling the head of public affairs that he would gladly give it free pictures if it gave him access.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Jan 2 Tip: Experience an evening with Mark Nepo

Experience an evening with Mark Nepo

(The January 2 Compassionate Living Tip from Interfaith Paths to Peace)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hp8nn2hGyU&feature=youtu.be

Poet. Spiritual master...struggling human being (like the rest of us)