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Chattering Mind

Westin Hotel’s smoking ban is in full flower after a year’s work and a $3 million investment in its (fittingly named) BREATHE campaign. Smokers will be billed an additional $200 room fee if they smoke anywhere in the hotels, but I wonder how the heck hotel managers will enforce that. Of course, outdoor smoking space…

Check out this “Code of the Callboy” editorial from today’s New York Times by Dan Savage. An excerpt: “…today it is arguably more shameful and damaging to be a hypocritical closet case than it is to be a sex worker. Even those delighted by Mr. Haggard’s disgrace — disclosure: I count myself among their number…

Thanks to Glittering Muse blogger David Garnet for alerting me to the existence of this laughing baby clip. Helps you understand while some people drink or take drugs to get to this luscious, open space. Of course, there are healthier ways, like honest laughter, as this baby teaches us…

As I write this, the country is finishing up a day of voting. Whether you’re voting red or blue or chartreuse, there’s no doubt this has been a decidedly unspiritual past month, politically speaking; mud has been slung on all sides. Which makes me glad for a new collection of essays that looks wonderful, “Mindful…

Gee, what got into me? I stayed up late shopping online for holiday bed linens again. And then, I didn’t buy a thing. It’s the same every year. I say to myself, “Oh, it’s silly to buy bed sheets just for the winter holidays,” but then the next year, I find myself looking around again,…

While you’re browsing in the flannel sheet department, don’t forget to get some hot water bottles–for yourself or to wrap as winter gifts. I actually put my growing boys (don’t tell them I told you this) to bed with one each and every night from November through February. They seem to find them soothing, and…

Here’s one of my favorite gay spirituality and culture blogs. In one post, writer Greg DiStefano quotes this passage from the “Gospel According to Thomas”: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you don’t bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth…

I went to our local Barnes & Noble Monday morning and picked up Sinclair Lewis’s famous study of religious hypocrisy–the 1927 novel called “Elmer Gantry” (which became an Academy Award-winning film starring Burt Lancaster in 1960). In the novel, Elmer Gantry is a fictionalized Christian evangelist who drinks, womanizes and secretly indulges in a life…

We don’t really know yet which charges against Ted Haggard are true or false, but it’s impossible to watch the unfolding of the evangelical pastor’s alleged gay sex scandal without thinking of Carl Jung’s writings on “shadow”–the least acknowledged or examined parts of the self–and Ken Wilber’s belief in the importance of shadow integration for…

As I grapple with a father and two in-laws who hate the idea of assisted-living communities, I keep insisting “As for me, I’m ready to move into one now.” Who can beat daily yoga classes in the rec room, Tai Chi, movie night, poker, trivia games, plus round-the-clock nursing? Count me in, I’m on my…
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