TruthBook Religious News Blog

The hot new frontier of neuroscience: meditation!

Richard Davidson, 54, is at once a distinguished scientist and an avid spiritual seeker. He became fascinated with meditation in the '60s. As a graduate student at Harvard, he channeled that interest into the study of psychology and neuroscience. In his spare time, he hung out with Ram Dass, Timothy Leary's former LSD research partner turned mystic. Davidson traveled to India for a meditation retreat, then finished his doctorate in biological psychology and headed to the University of Wisconsin, where he now directs the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior.

The Dalai Lama learned of Davidson's work from other scientists and in 1992 invited him to Dharamsala, India, to interview monks with extensive meditation experience about their mental and emotional lives. Davidson recalls the "extraordinary power of compassion" he experienced in the Dalai Lama's presence.

A decade later, he got a chance to examine Tibetan Buddhists in his own lab. In June 2002, Davidson's associate Antoine Lutz positioned 128 electrodes on the head of Mattieu Ricard. A French-born monk from the Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Ricard had racked up more than of 10,000 hours of meditation.

Lutz asked Ricard to meditate on "unconditional loving-kindness and compassion." He immediately noticed powerful gamma activity - brain waves oscillating at roughly 40 cycles per second - indicating intensely focused thought. Gamma waves are usually weak and difficult to see. Those emanating from Ricard were easily visible, even in the raw EEG output. Moreover, oscillations from various parts of the cortex were synchronized - a phenomenon that sometimes occurs in patients under anesthesia.

The researchers had never seen anything like it. Worried that something might be wrong with their equipment or methods, they brought in more monks, as well as a control group of college students inexperienced in meditation. The monks produced gamma waves that were 30 times as strong as the students'. In addition, larger areas of the meditators' brains were active, particularly in the left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for positive emotions.

Davidson realized that the results had important implications for ongoing research into the ability to change brain function through training. In the traditional view, the brain becomes frozen with the onset of adulthood, after which few new connections form. In the past 20 years, though, scientists have discovered that intensive training can make a difference. For instance, the portion of the brain that corresponds to a string musician's fingering hand grows larger than the part that governs the bow hand - even in musicians who start playing as adults. Davidson's work suggested this potential might extend to emotional centers.

But Davidson saw something more. The monks had responded to the request to meditate on compassion by generating remarkable brain waves. Perhaps these signals indicated that the meditators had attained an intensely compassionate state of mind. If so, then maybe compassion could be exercised like a muscle; with the right training, people could bulk up their empathy. And if meditation could enhance the brain's ability to produce "attention and affective processes" - emotions, in the technical language of Davidson's study - it might also be used to modify maladaptive emotional responses like depression.

Davidson and his team published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in November 2004.

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Thursday, January 19, 2006

Self is the new Bible for young

TRADITIONAL religious education classes no longer work and are failing to attract children to the church.

While generations of Australian school children have been captive congregations, modern pupils are bucking against receiving church teaching.

Instead, Generation Y, the children born after 1979, are revealing a streak of independence, according to a major study of their attitudes to spirituality, to be released mid-year.

The finding will have churches and church-affiliated schools rethinking their approach to religious education, if they have not already done so.

"To their credit, they are already exploring a variety of new ways of engaging students about religion," says the Christian Research Association's senior research officer, Reverend Philip Hughes.

The three-year study was not designed to examine religious education, but Dr Hughes conceded "it does have implications for how religious education is done: you cannot 'hand on' your faith".

The study included 350 face-to-face interviews, 1200 telephone interviews and a schools-based component in which 2500 students were surveyed across 20 schools, most of which were church-affiliated. "There is a strong sense among the young that they will make their own choices about faith, they think it is their responsibility to do so," Dr Hughes said.

This was supported by the study's finding that when faced with a big decision or a problem, 86per cent of students said it was likely they would think it through themselves rather than turn to others.

On the question of where they turned when seeking help to "work out" their lives, only 9per cent said school religious education classes were very important, while family and friends were ranked very important by about 75per cent.

Another finding of the study was that many young people did not know if there was a God but were not bothered by their uncertainty: friendship and family life gave them a sense of purpose in the world.

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Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Life wasn't always a laugh for Jim Carrey

HIS rubber-faced antics have helped make him one of the most successful comics in the world. But life hasn't always been one big laugh for Jim Carrey.

The Hollywood star only stumbled into comedy because of a family catastrophe which still haunts him. When he was just 12 his father lost his job and times were so tough the Carrey clan were forced to sleep in a camper van.

It was young Jim who turned the family fortunes around when he dropped out of school and started performing a stand-up act in clubs. And although he's gone on to become one of the highest-paid stars in Hollywood, he says he can't forget those early dark days.

"We hit the skids and we lost everything," he says, displaying a rare, serious side. "It wasn't really about losing your stuff, it's how the neighbours look at you. I saw what that does to a family very early on and it changed me.

"It gave me an edge which I use all the time. Everything painful that happens to you in your life becomes the tools that you use when you're doing a part. You don't ever think of it at the time. I wish you could.

"I wish when you had your heart ripped out by somebody, and you're gutted and laying on a rock somewhere, and seagulls are carrying away your pancreas, I wish you could say, 'This is going to be good someday. I'm going to use this'," he adds, reverting to his trademark manic grin.

But though his own poverty-stricken days are far behind him - he now commands more than 20 million dollars a movie thanks to a string of box office hits, including The Truman Show and The Mask - the star insists money hasn't brought him happiness.

"Everybody should get rich and famous and have everything they ever dreamed of so they can see it's not the answer," he says.

Instead he says it's only his quest for spirituality which has brought him genuine fulfilment.

"I think somehow maybe I just have grandiose thoughts, have the desire to be a great soul at some point," he smiles.

The star also says being a dad to 19-year-old Jane is one of his greatest joys.

"Even just a moment with my daughter will make me happy," he says.

"I work a lot but I have a very peaceful home," he says. "I'm very quiet there, and I love to have my friends over for dinners and do things with my daughter. My house is very Zen and a very quiet place. It's difficult to get me out of there."

Even so, he's still one of the most in-demand stars in the world and though he never has to worry about working again, he says he won't rest on his laurels.

"I'm in it for the long haul," he says. "Sometimes I think that God is somehow fashioning it so that I do stay interested and do stay hungry. That's why I might not get certain things. I like to keep having to prove myself."

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Two-thirds of US teenagers say religion and faith are important to ...

Two-thirds of U.S. teenagers say religion and faith are important to them, a new survey says.

But 39 percent of them are not sure how to connect to their religion, according to the 742 teens surveyed in a poll commissioned by the BBYO Jewish youth group.

Some 52 percent of respondents said they are looking for less conventional ways to connect with their religion. In other findings, 72 percent of teenage girls say religion is important to them, compared to 64 percent of teenage boys. Also, 92 percent of respondents want a better connection with their religion.

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Thursday, January 12, 2006

Speakers series explores spirituality

Boulder author and speaker Joan Borysenko will kick off a five-part lecture series that will bring to Fort Collins some of the leading speakers in New Age spirituality.

A medical scientist and psychologist who co-founded and directed the Mind-Body clinical programs at two Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals in the 1980s, Borysenko will speak at 7 p.m. Jan. 28 about the connection between love and physical health. See http://lightworksevents.com/

It's a connection that has been scientifically demonstrated in recent years, said Borysenko, who was part of research teams that conducted groundbreaking research in the mind-body connection.

"What we know in terms of good health is that a sense of connection to each other is the single most important mind-body skill for good health," she said.

In her lecture, Borysenko plans to offer guests concrete ways to cultivate more love, gratitude and forgiveness in their lives.

"What does (a sense of connection) look like? It's the practice of gratitude, the practice of forgiveness, the practice of being in the moment and making the mind your ally rather than your enemy. I'll talk about specific tools they can use to do that."

Other speakers in the series "Five Evenings with Extraordinary Speakers," which stretches throughout the spring, include Byron Katie, Gary Renard, Neale Donald Walsch and John Holland. They will address wide-ranging spiritual topics such as clarifying your relationship with God, loving your life as it is and contacting the spirit world.

"These are best-selling authors and are on the top list of speakers around the country," said Donna Visocky, whose LightWorks Productions is presenting the speakers. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the Kristi Visocky Memorial Foundation, which provides scholarships to young women.

"They have had a big impact on me. I wanted to share this. I wanted other people to get the same information I did," Visocky said. "What I see is that there is much more to life than what we see. There is way more to God and the universe than what we are looking to in our day-to-day lives."

Fort Collins resident Cindy Haraway is among those who have bought tickets for the series.

"I'm surprised that such top speakers are coming to Fort Collins and at such an affordable price," Haraway said.

Here are the other speakers who will follow Borysenko in the series:

* Byron Katie, 7 p.m. Feb. 28 -Author of the best-selling "Loving What Is" and "I Need Your Love - Is That True," Katie had developed a program she calls The Work to help people to find peace by learning not to fight reality. Her lecture is titled "Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life."

* Gary Renard, 7 p.m. March 28 - Renard's book "The Disappearance of the Universe," recounts his experience being visited by two reincarnated saints and offers new insight on some of the lessons of the popular self-study spiritual program "A Course in Miracles." Renard offers perspective on illusions, past-lives, religion, sex, politics and forgiveness

* Neale Donald Walsch, 7 p.m. April 20 - Walsch's "Conversations with God" series of books has been translated into 27 languages. Walsch seeks to free humanity from some of its beliefs about God, life and each other.

By KELLI LACKETT
KelliLackett@coloradoan.com

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Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Faith Fades Where It Once Burned Strong

This week Pope John Paul II is to celebrate his 25th anniversary as the head of the Roman Catholic Church, which is both Europe's and Christianity's largest denomination.

It has been a quarter century of enormous changes, and few have been more significant, for his church and mainstream Protestant denominations, than the withering of the Christian faith in Europe and the shift in its center of gravity to the Southern Hemisphere.

Christianity has boomed in the developing world, competing successfully with Islam, deepening its influence and possibly finding its future there. But Europe already seems more and more like a series of tourist-trod monuments to Christianity's past. Hardly a month goes by when the pope does not publicly bemoan that fact, beseeching Europeans to rediscover the faith.

Their estrangement has deep implications, including the prospect of schisms in intercontinental churches and political frictions within and between countries.

The secularization of Europe, according to some political analysts, is one of the forces pushing it apart from the United States, where religion plays a potent role in politics and society, shaping many Americans' views of the world.

Americans are widely regarded as more comfortable with notions of good and evil, right and wrong, than Europeans, who often see such views as reckless.

In France, which is predominantly Catholic but emphatically secular, about one in 20 people attends a religious service every week, compared with about one in three in the United States.

"What's interesting isn't that there are fewer people in church," said the Rev. Jean François Bordarier of Lille, in northern France, "but that there are any at all."

While France is an extreme case, its drift from Christian institutions and disparity with the United States hold true throughout much of Europe, where faithful attendance at Christian services, be they Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox, is the province of a small minority of people.

They show up to mark crucial milestones in their and their loved ones' lives. But they pay minimal heed, between those visits, to their churches' exhortations and admonitions.

The tension between contemporary attitudes and traditional church teachings has forced an emergency meeting this week of the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion.

They are expected to debate the acceptability of openly gay bishops in their church. Representatives from congregations in the developing world have threatened to break the church in two if their Western peers head in a permissive direction.

The preamble of a new, unfinished constitution for the European Union omits any mention of Christianity or even God among the cultural forces that shaped Europe, although the pope and other Christian leaders raised vehement objections.

"My own view is that there is a form of secular intolerance in Europe that is every bit as strong as religious intolerance was in the past," said John Bruton, a former Irish prime minister who was involved in the drafting of the document. He lobbied for God's inclusion.

Mr. Bruton's vantage point is Western Europe, but many Eastern European countries with a few exceptions, like the pope's native Poland are no more demonstrably devout. Having gone through religious outbursts after their emergence from Communism, they too seem poised to pivot in a secular direction.

Christianity's greatest hope in Europe may in fact be immigrants from the developing world, who in many cases learned the religion from European missionaries, adapted it to their own needs and tastes, then toted it back to the Continent.

In cities like Paris, Amsterdam and especially London, there are many thriving independent black churches, packed with newcomers from Nigeria, Sierra Leone and other African countries.

A recent report by Christian Research, a British group, determined that blacks and, to a lesser extent, Asians represent more than half the churchgoers in central London on a given Sunday, though they represent less than a quarter of the area's population.

By some estimates, more than 25 million people in England identify the Church of England as their denomination. Only 1.2 million actually go to one of the church's services every week.

"In Western Europe, we are hanging on by our fingernails," wrote the Rev. David Cornick, the general secretary of the United Reformed Church in Britain, in the June-July edition of Inside Out, a religious journal. "The fact is that Europe is no longer Christian."

That is something of an overstatement. Despite a recent influx of Muslim immigrants and the rise of mosques in countries like Britain, France and Germany, an overwhelming majority of Europeans who profess religious devotion consider themselves Christian. But for most, Christianity has evolved into an amorphous spiritual inclination rather than an exacting creed.

"In terms of religion, Europe is very complicated," said the Rev. Andrew M. Greeley, the author of "Religion in Europe at the End of the Second Millennium," which was published this year.

Sizable majorities of people in most European countries believe in God, and sizable majorities believe as well that some kind of religious service is important when a person dies, according to the European Values Study, a sweeping survey conducted in 1999 and 2000 and published this summer.

But they are less familiar with, or tethered to, the specific rituals and roots of Christian worship. "If you ask the average European the basic credo or statements of the Christian church, most of them don't know," said Grace Davie, a sociologist at the University of Exeter and the author of several books about religious trends in Britain and Europe.

According to the European Values Study, only about 21 percent of all Europeans said religion was "very important" to them. Although the methodology was not precisely comparable, a Gallup Poll this year showed that 58 percent of Americans defined religion that way.

Even in Italy, where 33 percent of respondents described religion as "very important," the percentage of Italians who go to church every week is as low as 15 and no higher than 33, according to various polls.

Europeans are moving well ahead of Americans and more aggressively challenging traditional Christian teachings by providing civil recognition for same-sex couples. Despite stern opposition from the Vatican, the French, Belgian, Dutch and German governments have granted same-sex couples legal entitlements and protections, and Britain is considering it, too.

Public schools throughout Western Europe have removed crosses from walls. Many congregations have been forced to close or combine operations, to make do with part-time ministers or to import pastors from the developing world.

There are many suggested reasons for Europe's drift, which happened gradually, over decades, as the continent grew wealthier and better educated.

One is a modern European cynicism about big institutions, grand ideologies and unfettered allegiances, manifest not only in partly empty churches but also in weakened support for labor unions and political parties.

"It's an overarching thing, a diminishing trust," said Rüdiger Noll, director of the Brussels-based Church and Society Commission of the Conference of European Churches, an interdenominational group.

The process of urbanization moved Europeans from quiet places where the church was at the center of life to chaotic bazaars where it got lost in the din.

The Rev. Enzo Bianchi, a Catholic theologian in Italy, said that in today's heterogeneous and often hedonistic European capitals, "there are more and more morals and ethics on the market."

"There's Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age spiritualism, consumerism," Father Bianchi said. "With all these competitors, it's harder for the church to sell."

But in the United States, to name one country, many of the same dynamics have not prompted a similarly pronounced estrangement. Some experts say that in Europe, suspicion of major denominations may run higher because religious leaders directly wielded political power in the past. Others say the unchallenged supremacy of state-blessed faiths in Europe like the Lutherans in Scandinavia and Anglicans in Britain perhaps turned out to be a curse.

"Monopolies damage religion," said Massimo Introvigne, the director of the Center for Studies on New Religions in Turin and a proponent of the relatively new theory of religious economy. "In a free market, people get more interested in the product. It is true for religion just as it is true for cars."

Some sociologists say new data suggest a possible reawakening of Christian interest in people under 30, and Christian movements throughout Europe are reaching out aggressively to them.

By FRANK BRUNI

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Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Church hopping, church shopping may be wave of future

If you want to see the future, look at the kids. The New York Times ran a piece today about teens and churches, that may be indicative of the future of congregations that accommodate young people—and those that don’t.

A reporter followed a couple teenagers around to their churches in Colorado Springs, Colo., documenting how an increasing number of teens now opt to switch churches in order to meet their spiritual or worship needs, or to simply meet up with their friends.

In a survey of 13- to 17-year-olds conducted from 2002 through 2003, the National Study of Youth and Religion found that 16 percent of respondents participated in more than one religious congregation, the Times reported. Four percent attend youth groups outside their congregations.

Considering what other trouble they could have with their teens, parents, obviously, aren’t too opposed to their teen going to another church, even more than one each week. But some church leaders see a danger in the shallow sort of commitment this sort of church hopping may produce on the part of young believers who act more like consumers than congregants.

There is a fine line between serving the unchurched or adapting to a culture, and creating a consumer-driven church, however. Certainly traditions should give way to relevance if churches are intent on attracting each successive generation. But, in creating worship environments that appeal to contemporary culture—which is largely based on consumption in America, churches may also inadvertently be creating more young consumers of spirituality, rather than discipling believers and growing church members as servants of Christ.

Churches as consumers

The tables are turned when churches find themselves in the market for goods and services. From churches in the midst of a building project, to those remodeling, expanding or refurbishing, congregations have material needs as well.

Information may be the best tool for wise stewardship in this case.

by Rebecca Barnes

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Surveying the stories of 2005

The death of Pope John Paul II, followed by the election of Pope Benedict XVI, were rated the top two stories in religion for 2005 in a survey of specialized reporters belonging to the Religion Newswriters Association.

Participants also overwhelmingly picked John Paul as the year's top "religion newsmaker."

The other top 10 events, in order:

- Controversy over removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.

- Faith-based agencies' response to hurricane Katrina, the Asian tsunami and Pakistan earthquake.

- Mainline Protestant denominations' ongoing discord over homosexuality.

- Evolution and "intelligent design" debates, especially in Kansas schools and a Pennsylvania federal case.

- The U.S. Supreme Court's split decisions on Ten Commandments displays.

- Religious involvement in Supreme Court nomination politicking.

- A Vatican policy statement barring most gays from seminaries and ordination.

- Billy Graham's farewell revival meeting in New York City.