In this week’s JOURNAL, Bill Moyers conversed with sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot about her book, THE THIRD CHAPTER: PASSION, RISK, AND ADVENTURE IN THE 25 YEARS AFTER 50, which explores the challenges and exciting opportunities for people in that age range.

Lawrence-Lightfoot said:

“All of us, at this point, to some degree are on a search for meaningfulness, for purposefulness, and we want to find what this next 25 years – the penultimate chapter of our life – is going to be about. We’re ready for something new, for a new experience, for a new adventure... My favorite thing about this period is restraint – how wonderful it is to know a little more about when not to talk, when not to move forward, when it’s best to listen and sit back, when it’s best to just witness and observe. That kind of slowness of pace offers us the opportunity to see things newly, to discover things that we hadn’t seen before, to see the small incremental steps rather than expect the large leaps forward.”

What do you think?

Whatever your age, have you lived chapters of "change, growth and new learning"? Tell us about your experience.

Tag(s): spirituality
Posted by Bill Moyers Journal at 5:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (83) | TrackBacks (0)

(Photo by Robin Holland)

This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers spoke with religious scholar Karen Armstrong about her efforts to promote understanding between cultures. Armstrong suggested that human nature has an inherent tension between compassion and the desire that one’s views be the absolute truth:

“Compassion doesn’t mean feeling sorry for people. It doesn’t mean pity. It means putting yourself in the position of the other, learning about the other, learning what’s motivating the other, learning about their grievances... The three monotheisms – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have a besetting tendency: that is idolatry, taking a human idea of God, a human doctrine, and making it absolute, putting it in the place of God. Now, there have been secular idolatries too. Nationalism was a great idolatry. The state can be... We are constantly creating these idols, erecting a purely human ideal or value to the supreme reality. Once you’ve made something essentially finite, once you’ve made it an absolute, it has to then destroy any rival claimants, because there can only be one absolute... And we get a lot of secular people doing this too... I think the so-called liberals can also be just as hard-lined in their own way.”

What do you think?

How do you balance compassion and empathy for others’ experience with working towards your core beliefs?

Tag(s): spirituality
Posted by Bill Moyers Journal at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (355) | TrackBacks (0)

(Photo by Robin Holland)

This week on the JOURNAL, Bill Moyers spoke with Parker J. Palmer, founder of the Center for Courage & Renewal, about the challenge of remaining positive and spiritually whole in difficult times.

“I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy, and I think the opportunity now is for us to get real. And I think that’s going to make us, in the long run, more happy... A new habit of the heart would allow us to take the broken hearted experience in a new direction, not towards shattering into a million pieces but towards a heart that grows larger, more capacious, more open to hold both the suffering and the pain of the world... Whether we’re Democrats or Republicans or independents, we have to learn to hang together or we’re gonna hang separately. We have to learn a new set of habits of the heart, and I think that can happen.”

What do you think?

In challenging times, what inspires you and helps you keep it together?

Tag(s): spirituality
Posted by Bill Moyers Journal at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (118) | TrackBacks (0)