The notion of a contemporary epiphany to me is very exciting, because it's a sort of biblical thing. It's something that has happened to people in other centuries or in the context of religious experience.
When I work in the theater, you know you'll get this almost devotional, religious experience where you're breaking bread with everyone every day.
Let's say black, the whole black religious experience, here, is very impressive to me, because when I first arrived I realized that people carry their faith with so much pride.
Americans have not only a right but a responsibility to consider the values of those who seek to lead them - whether they arise from life experience, political ideology or religious belief.
Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.
For many people who were never religious or who leave the religion of their childhood behind, it's the experience of having children of your own that brings an urgency to the question of what you believe.
Ultimately, jokes are this really special thing that we can all share. It's exciting to have basically a thousand people in a room together that can laugh at the same time, but I think of it almost as, like, a religious experience.
I was brought up by an Episcopalian father and Presbyterian mother in nondenominational Army chapels all over the world and never really had much religious experience.
The most critical of these new religious developments for twentieth-century religious liberalism were a renewed and transformed emphasis on mystical practice and experience, the healing ministry known as mind cure, and the rise of modern psychology. ...
One need not believe in Pallas Athena, the virgin goddess, to be overwhelmed by the Parthenon. Similarly, a man who rejects all dogmas, all theologies and all religious formulations of beliefs may still find Genesis the sublime book par excellence. E...
It is the voice of everyday people, rather than of a self-conscious 'artist', that we hear in Caedmon's Hymn, and in such texts as Deor's Lament (also known simply as Deor) or The Seafarer. These reflect ordinary human experience and are told in the ...
Probably the first time I left Italy was to travel by train to Lourdes. I went with my mother and my grandmother - who was a very religious person - so it was a pilgrimage of sorts. I remember it as a very intense, but beautiful experience.
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
One time on a dive, I wound up drifting up in darkness surrounded by billions of photoluminescent creatures. It was a religious experience, one only a poet could do justice to.
Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.
Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.
I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience.
I took the role because it's rare to read a script that makes me laugh and cry, and it spoke to my own religious feelings, as well as giving me a chance to draw on my experience as a parent. Accepting it was a no-brainer.
In the case of someone who is spiritual receptive, it is possible to talk of an analogy between the impact made by a work of art and that of a purely religious experience. Arts acts above all on the soul shaping its spiritual structure.
The border between personal and transpersonal experience is a complex region. It is a territory often filled with spiritual and religious views. Within psychology it was a significant preoccupation of William James, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, and man...
Why grace? Because some days, it's the only thing we have in common. Because it's the one thing I'm certain is real. Because it's the reason I'm here. Because it's the oxygen of religious life, or so says a musician friend of mine, who tells me, “W...
