Saturday, April 29, 2006
"DIVINITY WITHOUT DOGMA
A look at Progressive Churches" is the title of an essay at Chicago's ConsciousChoice.
The new spirituality without doctrine religion is described in this essay as "those who avoid dogmatism at all costs" who can "at the same time long for regular communal religious experience..." The first example of this is "New Thought".
Most of us are familiar with Transcendentalism through the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Fewer of us know that the literary-philosophical movement of the mid-1800s was succeeded by a movement with religious implications called New Thought. New Thought affirms "the creative power of constructive thinking," according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, and individual New Thought leaders have "employed concepts from every variety of idealistic, spiritualistic, pantheistic, cabalistic, and theosophical thought, as well as from Christianity." The movement began holding annual national conventions in 1894.
Barbara Bernstein, the executive director of the Association for Global New Thought headquartered in Evanston, Illinois, comments that the movement "accepts all religions, embraces all traditions." It is about "developing a relationship with our spiritual source and living our lives out of that source." Seven hundred churches worldwide are associated with the movement, and many of them have developed their own individual approach to pursuing this goal of living in spirit.
Divinity without Dogma is the essence of relativism. When everything is accepted, what we are really saying is that nothing is accepted. How can Focolare bring a New Thought conference to Castel Gondolfo, giving the impression that Catholicism is open to this? Can wrong also be right?
