John Shirley

About the Author

John Shirley is the author of Gurdjieff: An Introduction to His Life and Ideas (Penguin/Tarcher), and novels such as Doyle After Death (HarperCollins/Witness) and The Other End.

Author Archive Page

HOW GOD BECAME GOD: What Scholars are Really Saying About God And the Bible

April 28, 2016By John Shirley

“We have been thrown into this world without knowing why or how. As people sometimes say, “I didn’t ask to be born.” And you didn’t (at least as far as you can remember). But you are here, and you have to deal with it.”

What is the miraculous? Our first thought may be that it concerns a supernatural and sensational event. And yet this Summer 2018 issue of Parabola reveals that the most ordinary action—digging a garden or cooking a meal or making art—becomes sensational when it is performed with mindful awareness of what we are doing. Any action may be automatic or creative, repetitious or truly alive, participating in the life that is happening in the instant: “The situation is completely different when my action is not a repetition but something new, an action that can only take place in the present moment to respond to a need that I recognize right now,” writes Jeanne de Salzmann in this issue. Read more>

Stephen Weiss, MD, portrait of Brother David Steindl-Rast, Mt. Saviour Monastery, Elmira, NY

Learning to Die, by Brother David Steindl-Rast

The only point where one can start to talk about anything, including death, is where one finds oneself. And for me this is as a Benedictine monk. In the rule of St. Benedict, the momenta […]

The Art of Cleaning, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee and Hilary Hart

Housework as spiritual practice, from a Sufi master

Marion Woodman and the Search for the Conscious Feminine, by Patty de Llosa

“The true feminine is the receptacle of love. The true masculine is the spirit that goes into the eternal unknown in search of meaning. The great container, the Self, is paradoxically both male and female […]

Hearing the Cries of the World, by Mark Nepo

This story is so old we don’t know who told it or who it’s about, except that it speaks to all of us. We no longer know if it was a “he” or “she” at the center of the story. […]

To Go Beyond Thought, an Interview with Karen Armstrong

One bright spring day, Parabola met with Karen Armstrong in her suite at the Parker Meridian hotel in Manhattan. The petite, friendly 62-year-old British ex-nun, arguably the most influential commentator on religion in the English-speaking […]

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