The Heart of Religious Renewal
The Light in Every Thing is a podcast of the Seminary of The Christian Community in North America. Learn more about the Seminary at our website or become a friend and supporter with access to more content at our Patreon.
Our thanks to Elliott Chamberlin who composed the opening music, "On the Road" and the closing music, "Seeking Together". You can find more of his music here.
Episode 1: Prayer and the Whole Human Being
In this new series “The Heart of Religious Renewal,” we take up the subject of prayer as a foundational expression of and path to ‘whole humanness.’ First, what do we mean by religious life? And, secondly, what are the particular qualities of prayer that, in our time, allow for the renewal of religious life?
Episode 2: Divine-Human Interdependence - Thinking’s Role in Prayer
In this episode we are reminded again that our very relationship to religious life is at stake, if we cannot find the way to an authentic expression of prayer. Beyond that, we are shown how prayer is essentially about Life of the highest order; how, through prayer, “spiritual forces from the heavenly realms can be received and taken in and made fruitful on the earth.”
Episode 3: Knowing Christ in Freedom - More on Thinking's Role in Prayer
In this episode, we further explore how thinking forms a kind of groundwork that offers confidence in our praying; not an abstract, merely intellectual thinking, but thinking intrinsically related to understanding our life experiences. How can we know that a being is worth following? Even more so, how can we know that we are actually in the presence of an ‘other,’ rather than an aspect of our own soul life? When we work in this way, knowledge builds a foundation of faith.
Episode 4: Then He Will Be With Us
In this episode, we delve deeper into how essential it is for the renewal of our religious life to include thinking in our life of prayer. This is a prayer life that can enable us to approach the divinity with our full, emerging humanity. Thinking permeated with reverence and love becomes a sensing organ we can turn towards the Spirit, and with patient humility hope to experience God’s living presence in and around us.
Episode 5: Receiving in Prayer
In prayer we reach out and up to a being greater than ourselves - for many different reasons. But, as you’ll hear in this conversation, “the heart of Christian prayer is union with Christ.” If uniting with Him is the highest goal of prayer life, how do we make our hearts a dwelling and invite Christ in?
Episode 6: Union with the Life of the Cross
Christ gifts us our true humanity when we allow three things to become alive in us: the mystery of His suffering and death, the mystery of His resurrection, and the mystery of His manifesting or revelation. This episode considers what it means to unite with the Being who chooses the cross again and again. Can we follow Christ to the cross and die to our old ways? Through our dying, can we open to the Spirit and be raised?
Episode 7: Resurrection in Us
As those who seek union with Christ, we turn towards Him, we grow towards Him, so He can gift us with His resurrection forces. This episode explores what it means to open ourselves to these forces of resurrection, even while bearing our cross. As those forces flow into us, we can feel the power of joyful hope; a power that assures us the victory is won even while we are still going through the battle.
