a muslim yogi
Peggy Rosenthal, in The IMAGE Blog:
Say the word “Muslim” these days, especially “American Muslim,” and many people get jittery. The antidote to this jitteriness, I’m convinced, is to get to know lots of American Muslims, in all their variety, all their individualities.And there’s no better place to start—or to continue—than by reading Kazim Ali’s new book, Fasting for Ramadan.
Poet and Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College, Ali is as American as apple pie—or as bagels or pizza or curry or hummus.
These food analogies might seem a bit odd for a book with this title. But Fasting for Ramadan isn’t just about fasting. For Ali, the 30-day Ramadan fast draws his attention to the body’s nature in ever-new ways. So the book is about what it means to live in a body, how body-mind-spirit are connected, where our “self” resides, how the practices of Islam and yoga reinforce each other.
Yes, yoga. Ali has taught yoga and has a yoga practice. (What could be more American than that?) “Yoga,” he writes,” is from the same Sanskrit word that gives the word ‘yolk.’ And ‘yoke.’
And, interestingly: ‘religion.’ Which can be both yolk and yoke, fruitfully and restrictively. Yoga is a practice, not unlike fasting, that allows us to link the inside—the private experiences of the body and the mind—with the outside—the pulsing, breathing, actual world.
Say what?
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 11:11 am
"these very writings, by the very fact that they were canonical, saw to it that they were recognized and proclaimed to be canonical"
"we will not be obedient to the Church but to the Word of God, and therefore in the true sense to the Church"
"an absolute guarantee that... what we know as the Canon is closed... cannot be given by the Church"
"a biblical theology [is] a series of attempted approximations, a collection of individual exegeses. There can never be... a system"
barth on theology: don't connect the dots. http://goo.gl/Dx04I
barth needs a tl;dr edition http://goo.gl/Dx04I
"we cannot think it: we can only contemplate it. we cannot assert & prove it: we can only believe it..." http://goo.gl/Dx04I
"Scripture attests itself in the fact that at its decisive centre it attests the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead"
