Film Reviews

“Tony Robbins: I am Not Your Guru,” reviewed by Tracy Cochran

September 19, 2016By Tracy Cochran

The Netflix film “Tony Robbins: I am Not Your Guru” shows healing in action.

A Triumph No Villain Can Defeat, by Alexandra Ashmore

April 29, 2016By Alexandra Haven

Created by the young English woman Mary Shelley with her novel Frankenstein, modern science fiction has never belonged to the exclusive circles of young and mostly American white men so often stereotyped. […]

Full of Direst Cruelty: A Review of Macbeth, 2015

November 12, 2015By Alexandra Haven

Director Justin Kurzel’s 2015 adaptation of Macbeth is the Scottish play at its best: deeply wicked with a brutal sense of immediacy. […]

Insight Out: A Review of Pixar’s “Inside Out”

August 18, 2015By Jess Napp

J.M. Barrie once said, “Growing up is such a barbarous business, full of inconvenience… and pimples.” In Pixar’s latest cinematic creation, Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) is a typical 10-year-old living in a small Midwestern town. She loves her family, friends, hockey and goofing around. …

In his heralded poem “Burnt Norton,” T.S. Eliot speaks of “The still point of the turning world,” a near perfect expression of Change and the Changeless. Eliot attended lectures in 1920s London by the Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky, featured in this Spring 2019 issue of Parabola; no surprise as the search for that still point is a perennial spiritual quest, one that has inspired seekers from the Buddha to Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and countless others including G.I. Gurdjieff, Ouspensky’s own teacher. Read more>

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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 […]