Richard Smoley

About the Author

Richard Smoley is a consulting editor to Parabola. His latest book, How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible, was reviewed in Parabola, Summer 2016.

Author Archive Page

“THE FIVE HEARTS OF DIVINE LOVE WITH CHRIST CRUCIFIED” FIFTEENTH CENTURY, GERMANY, WOOD-CUT

Love and Money, by Richard Smoley

January 10, 2018By Richard Smoley

The secret prices of love

Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson

October 31, 2016By Richard Smoley

Author Colin Wilson (1931–2013) was a lucky man in many ways. His luck continues after his death, with Gary Lachman’s biography Beyond the Robot, which is likely to be both the most comprehensive and the most favorable treatment Wilson will ever receive.

“You cannot serve both God and mammon,” advises Jesus in the Gospel of St. Matthew, but many of us spend our lives trying to do just that. Our inner search is real—and so is our desire for the pleasures of this world and the money that can buy them.

In this Spring 2018 issue on “Wealth,” we explore how men and women, great teachers and ordinary sinners alike, have approached this fundamental challenge of human existence: God, mammon, or both? The ways are many. 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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