Published:Sunday, March 30, 2014

Updated:Sunday, March 30, 2014 21:03

If you like to read my article regularly (and I am very thankful and appreciative if you do) then you wouldve read my article on Lent and my struggle with spirituality that I wrote about a month ago.

If not, well, never fear (I dont see why you would fear, though. I wouldnt know the difference unless you told me), for at least one person did.

She contacted me via email and was interested in my journey of spiritual growth. She invited me to breakfast and then to her church discussion group afterwards.

We went to IHOP before church for what else? pancakes. I was frightened of a potential shortage of chocolate chips in my chocolate chip pancakes, but other than that, breakfast was wonderful.

We had breakfast with a couple that also went to the same church we were about to attend, and though we werent talking about religion or church, I still learned a lot about other things like interviews and buying and selling houses.

It was a lovely way to start the morning.

After breakfast, it was church time.

I have to admit, this was the first time that I have ever gone to church by myself and I am 21 years old.

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Spiritual journey continues

CAPE COAST, March 28, (BERNAMA-NNN-GNA) -- Executive Director of Healthy Ghana Professor Agyeman Badu Akosa, has expressed regret that some Ghanaians still held the belief that superstition, instead of germs and said this was one of the major drawbacks of the health care system in Ghana.

He said it was worrying that even the highly educated held firmly to this belief and would resort to prayer camps instead of hospitals until the situation became worse.

Prof. Akosa was speaking on Communication, Culture and Health at the third day of the first University of Cape Coast (UCC) Faculty of Arts Colloquium in Cape Coast with the aim of providing a platform for researchers in the humanities at UCC and other avenues to disseminate research findings on selected themes in order to inform policy briefs of the University and the nation.

Participants, drawn from various health, culture and communication disciplines including staff and students of the Faculty of Arts are being taken through three plenary presentations, forty-eight scientific research reports, a seminar as well as a round table discussion.

Prof. Akosa expressed concern that the poor and aged were invariably accused of using witchcraft to cause diseases and other predicaments, adding that many lives which had been lost to convulsion and other health conditions could have been saved if the superstition factor had been eliminated.

He said even though prayer camps continuously abused peoples trust , patrons would always choose the camps over hospitals and warned leaders of such camps to be careful with their activities since they could be legally held responsible for the death of the sick persons under their care.

He condemned the belief that the human urine could cure diseases and urged the general public to be wary of the kind of medical advice they adhere to.

Prof Akosa, a pathologist, said the superstition factor had led to the lack of trust in pathologists since most people thought it was unnecessary or held strongly to the belief that some people especially traditional leaders were not supposed to be operated even in their demise.

He said some Ghanaians even the well -educated did not possess the habit of reading about their health conditions either on line or in magazines and therefore encouraged them to read more about health especially the labels and briefs that come with drugs.

On herbal medicine Prof. Akosa said the mystic power of herbal medicine had eluded the herbalists ability to identify the active ingredients in the herbs and had therefore set the stage for criticism of herbal medicines ability to cure more than one disease.

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Superstition Is A Drawback To Ghana's Health Care System

Just 60 years ago, Tibetan Buddhism was the most secretive religious tradition in the world. It reserved its initiations exclusively for monastics, who had to prove themselves worthy of higher teachings with decades of intensive practice locked away behind the worlds highest mountains. Now you can sign up in any small Western city for a weekend workshop that will offer you those same practices for the price of admission. And you may combine those Tibetan practices with your yoga, with your faith in Christ, with a little Zen or with some personal combination of everything.

People seem to be leaving conventional religion in droves. The reasons for the desertions are multiple: sex scandals, power scandals, the inability of traditional religion to come to terms with contemporary culture and its evolving moral values, personal experience being given increasing priority over religious dogma, the development of a spiritual supermarket offering views and practices from all over the world, and both people within religious traditions and people with none swapping notes and making their own selections from the myriad spiritual options now available. Some people choose to stay within their religious tradition but incorporate the wisdom and practices of other traditions into an understanding of their own.

Meanwhile, the sharing of therapeutic and psychological methods has become a mainstream activity, aided, for better and for worse, by media celebrities like Oprah and the dozens of yoga and meditation shows on television. The result of all of these changes is a spiritual supermarket, and shopping at it is the movement of the times.

You may rail at what you perceive to be the commercialization of religious practices and of personal stories, but its happening. And while many may trivialize what they learn into yet another easy belief system or the development of a spiritual ego that has suddenly seen the light, others are being spurred to ask questions that they may never have addressed on their own. They are drawn to take the journey inside, and for many, that journey is not just a progression toward a healthy ego invaluable as that is in itself but also an opening to the transcendent dimensions of human experience.

More than ever in human history, people everywhere are on a rising curve of individuation, developing a conscious wish to deepen their relationship with their inner core. Individuation is not individualism. The latter is the pursuit of my happiness regardless of yours, and it has been on an upward trajectory ever since the old allegiances of family and tribe began to be chipped away in earnest by the Industrial Revolution. Individuation, however, is a maturing authenticity that enables you to feel not separate from, but intimately connected to others and the collective good. Individuation requires us to ask questions of ourselves rather than be content with easy answers questions not just about our personal live

but the larger, existential questions too, about our values, our purpose, our meaning. America is also an engine of individuation.

Those who are on the path of individuation are the most likely members of the spiritual, not religious sector of the population. These are the people for whom faith tends to be more central than belief; for whom religion has become a personal spiritual affair instead of an institution whose belief system you sign up for. People like this are not so concerned with what they believe or dont believe; they want to know how rather than what how they can connect to a world beyond their own ego, a world of meaning and value that they intuit to be present, and yet are not always in touch with.

Another sign of the times is that, while traditional religions are on the wane in the West, atheism is seeing one of its periodic revivals. Its high priests are best-selling writers such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens. The physical universe is all there is, they say, and if there are mysteries in its workings that we do not yet understand, science will eventually unlock them with the rational application of the scientific method. Three pounds of gray matter is the source of all wonders. In refuting the supernatural in any shape or form, a rational understanding of the world also necessarily seems to eliminate the question of faith.

More than a hundred years ago, William James noted:

[Rationalism] will fail to convince or convert you. ... If you have intuitions at all, they come from a deeper level of your nature than the loquacious level that rationalism inhabits. Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk ...

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Roger Housden/column: In the spiritual supermarket

There is no shortage of communities at Columbia. Of all the sub-entities that comprise our diverse population, there are a number that fit under a single, broader category. This umbrella group is made up of all those students who see themselves as religiously affiliatedbe it with a group, doctrine, way of life, or individual belief.

The word religious is hard to define in a single way, as are the many religious personalities and groups that make up this campus. Indeed, there is a wide varietytoo broad to detailof backgrounds, interests, and intellectual or spiritual journeys in our community. In this realm especially, no two students are alike. But there is a thread that connects them all: their belief in something beyond the secular liberalism that has come to define our age.

These are not the only students who search for, and sometimes find, deeper meaning in their environment. But for openly religious students in particular, a number of central questions take on added meaning: Has the University left intellectual room for spirituality? How do reason and faith relate in the classroom? And how do religious students interact with the environment surrounding them? While no student speaks for anyone but themselves, and no one story could contain the fullness of these students ways of life, this piece will attempt to explore a small segment of the vast and rich story of religion at Columbia.

An Anglican Legacy

The history of religion at Columbia begins much earlier than the founding of Hillel or the Muslim Students Association. Dating back to the earliest discussions at the beginning of the 18th century, the idea of establishing an institution of higher learning in the Province of New York was tied to the service of the Anglican Church. In 1704, Lewis Morris, the chief justice of New York and the British governor of New Jersey, wrote to the missionary arm of the Anglican Church saying that New York was an ideal place to establish a college.

At the time, college was as much a religious institution as it was a scientific and literary one. In 1746, when the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) was about to be founded, the general assembly of New York appointed a commission of 10 peopleseven of whom were Anglicansto direct the recently accrued funds to establish a college, which would later become Columbia. The commission voted to build the college on lands that had been vested to Trinity Church, on the condition that the colleges religious affiliation would be Anglican.

And yet, despite the way in which Columbia was foundedwith religious intentions in mindit was not created to train clergy, unlike its peer institutions. The earliest of the Ivies were colleges born out of American Protestantism and were initially founded to train clergy. Columbia was Anglicanand as a Kings College, was a bit different. ... Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were each founded because the previous ones became too liberal, Wayne Proudfoot, Columbia professor of religion, says.

In 1784, the New York State Legislature passed an act that prohibited the newly founded college from administering a religious test-oath to its faculty. Proudfoot still sees this legacy in Columbias religion department today, which came into its modern form in the 1950s. In contrast to its peer institutionsat which the faculty of undergraduate program in religion mirrored that of a Protestant seminarythe department at Columbia included scholars of religions from across the globe from its earliest years.

Religion and Reason Conflicts in the Classroom

Today on Columbias campus, the faade of Earl Hallthe building that houses the Office of the University Chaplaincontains the following engraving: Erected for the Students that Religion and Learning May Go Hand in Hand with Knowledge. In his recent book College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be, Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco suggests that placing these words on the building at the time of its establishment in the early 1900s meant that contemporaries probably no longer believed it. As for religion, it was becoming an anachronism, and was certainly no longer at the center of campus life, he writes.

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In Good Faith

Science creationism Back to the future? At South Carolina's Bob Jones University, Dr. Maude Stout "teaches the controversy" over evolution in 1948. Photo by Francis Miller/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Science loves balance. Gasses rush in to fill vacuums; cells seek homeostasis; an action is never quite satisfied until there has been an equal and opposite reaction. So its perhaps fitting that just days after the science wires were buzzing over a new (and thrilling) confirmation of the Big Bang, there is a new (and dispiriting) report on Politico.com about the growth of taxpayer-funded anti-science education in American schools.

According to Politico, 14 states will spend a collective $1 billion in 2014 on vouchers for private and religious schools that teach kids to mistrust not only the science of evolution, but also cosmology, geology, biology and even math. Twelve other statesincluding bright blue New Yorkare considering following their lead.

Occasionally the programs dont just teach the controversy, as their backers like to say, but something darker. Evolution, according to one set of texts, is a wicked and vain philosophy. Children are taught to discuss the importance of a right view of evolution, a view that does notno surpriseinclude an enthusiastic embrace of Darwin.

The problem with teaching children like thisapart from the fact that its simply incorrectis that it disqualifies them from full participation in the larger world. Its awfully hard to be part of the global conversation about the Big Bang breakthrough when understanding the science requires you to accept that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, while your teachers are telling you its less than 10,000. Its awfully hard to be mathematically literate when your geometry and algebra classes are being interrupted to discuss the role numbers play in the Bible.

All of this is being shouted about and litigated over, with the usual parties involved: the ACLU is suing to prevent New Hampshires and Colorados voucher programs from going forward; Republican political leadersincluding Sen. Lamar Alexander, Rep. Eric Cantor and La. Governor Bobby Jindalare calling for even more-ambitious voucher programs. The Koch Brothers and their billions are pushing for additional public subsidies to pay for the expanded programs.

Backers of the non-science curriculum, of course, frame their goals in the noble-sounding idea of allowing families to choose the best learning options for their children, in the phrasing of the website for Florida-based Step Up For Students, which provides scholarships for low-income kids to attend private schools. But their thinking is more troubling than that. Bob Tuthill, the groups head, told Politico that topics like the age of the Earth and the reasons for the Civil War are simply too controversial for the government to mandate how they should be taught. Once your anti-science ideology is bumping up against the whole Civil-War-was-about-states-rights-not-slavery school of thought, youve got to rethink the company youre keeping.

Even schools that take pains to give a nod to scientists do it in a qualified way that undoes their ostensible pointas when the website of a Philadelphia private school applauds the men and women of science, but cautions that our understanding is not complete until we filter it through Scripture. But science already has a filtration process in place, thank you very much. Its called peer review and many of those peers are people of deep faith and spirituality themselves; theyve simply learned to keep their religious beliefs and their scientific rigor far enough apart so that both are served well.

None of this non-science comes free. At the same time a Gallup poll reveals that 46% of Americans believe human beings were created in their present form, one international survey found American kids finishing 26th of 34 countries in math and 21st in science. Paul Peterson, the head Harvard Universitys Program on Educational Policy and Governance is oddly sanguine about where this could lead, according to Politico, predicting that the free-market system will weed out the schools that teach science badly, because parents will quit sending their kids there.

The problem is, before that happens the American economy will already have weeded out the children who graduated from those schoolsat least when it comes to competing for the highest skilled, best-paying jobs. And the global economy, which increasingly depends on innovation and high tech, will weed a little bit more of America out too.

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Creationism in SchoolsOn the Taxpayers Dime

San Diegos 13th annual Kyoto Prize Symposium was held on March 18 at the Conrad Prebys Aztec Student Union to honor Robert Heath Dennard who invented Dynamic Random Access Memory and proposed scaling theory guidelines.

DRAM operates the memory in digital equipment, storing data and programs. Its found in laptops, cell phones, digital cameras, game systems and other electronic devices. The scaling theory allowed Dennard to miniaturize transistors that allows for devices to be smaller, denser, faster and less expensive.

The event is part of a three-day celebration hosted by San Diego State, along with University of California, San Diego, University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene University.

The Kyoto Prize is an international award that honors significant contributions to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of humanity. It was created in 1984 by the nonprofit Inamori Foundation and is the highest private award for global achievement from Japan.

Three recipients are awarded the Kyoto Prize each year in the fields of advanced technology, basic sciences and arts and philosophy. Dennard is the Kyoto Prize laureate in advanced technology.

At the symposium, SDSUs Vice President for Research and Dean of Graduate and Research Affairs Stephen Welter introduced a pivotal moment in Dennards life when he was inspired to create DRAM.

What Im hoping for is theres someone else in this room who, like he was being inspired, will also be inspired, Welter said. In essence what is happening is hes paying forward the inspiration to you that he received from somebody else.

Welter then introduced Dennard, who presented a speech titled Reflections on Creativity in My Microelectronics Career in three parts.

He began with his background, growing up on a farm during the Great Depression and led into his education at Southern Methodist University and Carnegie Institute of Technology. His professional career began at International Business Machines, where he created DRAM.

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Kyoto Prize Symposium comes to SDSU

Durham, NC -

From how parents can best support their children's education to how a human brain can process several languages, Duke writers explore a wide array of topics in their latest books.

Many of the books, including new editions of previous titles, can be found on the "Duke Authors" display shelves near the circulation desk in Perkins Library. Some are available as e-books for quick download to your computer. Most can also be purchased through the Gothic Bookshop.

[Duke Today will provide similar updates in the future. If you are a member of the Duke faculty or staff who will be publishing a book of interest to a general audience, send us a message about it along with your publisher's brief description.]

Aidoo, Lamonte, co-editor: "Lima Barreto: New Critical Perspectives" (Lexington Books)

Aidoo, an assistant professor of Romance Studies and Luso-Brazilian Studies, weaves together 12 essays from Brazilian literary scholars, historians and anthropologists. The authors analyze the work of 19th- and 20th-century Afro-Brazilian writer and journalist Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto.

Andrews, Edna: "Neuroscience and Multilingualism" (Cambridge University Press)

Researchers estimate that half of all humans speak at least two languages, making multilingualism common. Andrews, recipient of the 2013 University Scholar/Teacher Award, offers a new model for analyzing multilingualism. This first book-length study of how two or more languages are represented in the human brain is the culmination of the past 10 years of her research.

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New Reads from Duke Faculty

General News of Thursday, 20 March 2014

Source: myjoyonline.com

Executive Director of the Narcotics Control Board (NACOB), Yaw Akrasi Sarpong says those against the lobbying for cannabis to be legalized in the country, appear to be losing the battle.

According to Mr. Akrasi Sarpong, the issue of drugs abuse has become more of public health issue than a moral one, but the anti-lobbyists have failed to effectively state their position and have rather turned to spirituality.

"If you are in a debate and you don't make an argument, you are on the losing side. It is not about a moral issue; drug abuse is a public health issue; cannabis use is hazardous if you use it on your person. Those are scientific data but the information gap between science and the society's knowledge needs to be bridged," Mr. Akrasi Sarpong said on the Super Morning Show on Joy FM on Thursday.

Additionally, he noted that "those of us, who are against it, we are just keeping quiet hoping that when we pray in tongues and pray in our rooms, then the challenge just goes off".

The Head of NACOB dominated the headlines a fortnight ago, when he called for a debate over whether or not marijuana should be legalized in the country. His reason is that increasingly, ordinary people do not think that possessing the mentally-disturbing substance is a crime.

Clarifying this point further, Mr. Akrasi Sarpong stated that calling on government to ban marijuana outright, is not the way to dealing with the drugs issue.

"Repression is not the solution to drugs issues...The evidence-based response is to involve the community; is to involve the society; it is not just sensitization...People think that if you smoke Indian Hemp then you are a bad man. That is not the way to go about it. The way to go about it is to recognize that it's a public health issue; the way to go about it is to tell people it is hazardous ...let's debate them [lobbyists] in the social media [and] let's debate them wherever they are. That is the way to go about it!", he emphasized He therefore called on the anti-lobbyists in the society to rise up to the challenge because; "we are on the losing side of the debate, but science and reason [common sense] are on our side".

Evidence of destruction

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Praying in tongues cannot fight drugs menace - Akrasi Sarpong

Reviewer Mike Alexander looks at the latest Mind Body & Spirit books.

THE GRAND ILLUSION By Brendan Murphy Balboa Press $68 (Hardback)

For the simple pilgrim on the path in search of truth, masterly and voluminous tomes such as Brendan Murphy's The Grand Illusion can often seem quite daunting despite their invaluable insights. The fact that this 500-page synthesis of science and spirituality is signalled as Book One might make it seem even more so. Thankfully, Murphy is an aspiring musician and very much an ordinary truth seeker with an extraordinary ability to dissect the commonalities in science and spirituality. Much of his focus is on what we might think of as extra-sensory abilities, such as clairvoyance, clairaudience, telekinesis, telepathy and psychokinesis but put in the context of scientific discovery which co-relates to mystical experiences and "unexplained phenomena" throughout history. While his exploration into what determines consciousness and how it impacts on the individual would make a worthy thesis, he writes and explains complex concepts in layman's terms, which is what makes The Grand Illusion one of those reference books that you dive into and come away with a better understanding of what is real and meaningful and what isn't.

DAWN OF THE AKASHIC AGE By Ervin Laszlo and Kingsley L Dennis Inner Traditions $35

Ervin Laszlo, founder and president of The Budapest Club, whose honorary members include Mikhail Gorbachev, Peter Gabriel, Paulo Coelho and Desmond Tutu, is a futurist who makes sense. In his latest book, a co-write with sociologist Kingsley L Dennis, on the changing and emerging times we live in they outline why we are at the precipice of a new age and why humanity must change if it is to have a future. Their basic premise is that the narrative of our time - perpetual growth - is simply not feasible anymore. We have advanced to the point where the resources of the planet can no longer meet our demands for food, minerals, fresh water, arable land and fossil fuels. There needs to be a mass shift in consciousness to make the necessary changes at a political, financial, social and inter-personal level if we are to avoid being the cause of our own extinction. They present a series of models addressing these issues, which irrespective of how one might feel about doomsday prophets (and their not) is almost required reading. The bottom line is that for the past 1000-odd years humanity has developed into a modern society on the back of a generous gift of nature that we have taken for granted.

YOU CAN HEAL YOUR HEART By Louise Hay and David Kessler HayHouse $25.99

Loss is an intrinsic part of the ebb and flow of life. How we move through it is often painful. It can be difficult to come to terms with the loss of someone we have loved, the ending of something we have valued and, curiously enough, even the termination of something that we know no longer serves us. Both Louise L Hay, a pioneer in empowering people to discover and implement their own personal power and David Kessler, who was mentored by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, are well qualified to write about how it is possible to find peace through the grieving process. Although You Can Heal Your Heart is primarily aimed at "finding peace after a breakup, divorce or death" as they point out loss is loss is loss. As each of the stages of grief is explained and clarified, the emphasis is very much on how we can change our thoughts around what we are feeling, and through that realisation, ultimately bring about resolution. The affirmations dotted throughout are more like alternative windows in how we can re-frame the thoughts around our pain. Grieving is neither denied nor underplayed but, as the authors point out in the introduction to one You Can Heal Your Heart, their intention is to help people honour the love and not the pain or suffering.

THE TURNING POINT By Gregg Braden HayHouse $27

We know we are living in a rapidly changing world. It's a time of extremes, a signal, perhaps, that we have outgrown the past but haven't yet fully accepted a new vision for the future. In his last book, Fractual Time, Gregg Braden examined the "choice points" or precise moments in time where similar cycles have begun and ended. The Turning Point explains further why we need to be aware of "choice points", integrate them into turning points and cross them before "we reach a tipping point of no return". In precisely detailing why we need to change he offers lengthy summaries of the four over-riding factors - climate, population, energy and economic - that make the times we live in so different from times past. The facts are nothing new to what has been presented in the past. The potential ways forward simple common-sense if the facts are not to be denied. As Braden cautions though we cannot change and "thrive in the new world if we are focussed on waiting for the old world to return". Agree with his conclusions or not, Braden is always a must-read.

SELF POWER By Deepak Chopra Rider $24.95

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Book reviews: Mind, Body and Spirit