At Christmas, properly we honor the birth of Jesus whose teachings inspire his followers but also speak to everyone in the world. To deepen the universality of Christmas, we might consider the images and rites of this festival are largely pagan and focus on the Winter Solstice, the passage from the darkest night and shortest days to the annual turn toward light and increasing sunlight.

A few decades ago now, John Gray published Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: The Classic Guide to Understanding the Opposite Sex. I have a problem with this popular title because men and women are from earth. We are all human beings, and to divide gender into two factions based on physiology is to make too hard a case for our differences.

One of the key activities of the psyche is to reflect on events and experiences. If we have no reflection, we act on passions and impulses that then do not have the advantage of being processed by the mind, references to memory and history and personal and social culture in general.

Recently in our family we had to make a difficult decision about having my stepson, his wife and her family visit us for the Christmas holidays. We live in New England, where the number of Covid cases has recently skyrocketed.

Christmas is one of my favorite holidays, and I have long thought that it is largely misunderstood. Some think it is mainly for children, but it seems to appeal not to actual children as much as to the child spirit in adults. Christmas is a celebration of the eternal, archetypal and mythic child.

Our father the sky and our mother the earth, / may your names always be held sacred. / May your realm of love and grace be ours to live, / and may we accomplish your vision of a wonderful world.

“Liminality” is a fascinating and rich word, difficult to define or describe, that points to an unusual situation when you feel you outside the normal. The word comes from the Latin “limen,” a threshold. Imagine standing in a doorway between two rooms.

On July 6, 1535 Thomas More, lawyer, devout Christian and intense family man, Lord High Chancellor of England, was beheaded at the order of King Henry VIII, his friend from childhood.

On October 10, 2017, St. Martin’s Press in the U.S. and Simon and Schuster in England will release my new book Ageless Soul: The Lifelong Journey Toward Meaning and Joy. Two days before the launch I will turn seventy-seven, and so I feel equipped to write about aging at this point in my life.

Until I was fifty I thought I would never have children. I felt like the eternal boy who was happy never to grow up. I cherished my freedom and had no muscle in me that wanted to settle down. Then I met my wife Joan Hanley.

On February 28, 2017 I had a recorded conversation with Gwilda Wiyaka on the Science of Magic Radio Show. Gwilda has a long background in shamanic arts and, according to her website, wants to reconcile science and magic.

In our day, most people seem to think of education as stuffing the mind with facts and training the body with skills. But the result is that we have a population that can do specialized work but doesn’t reflect on the bigger picture.

In June of 2015 I Oprah Winfrey’s producers invited me to have a conversation with Oprah on camera about my book A Religion of One’s Own. They said that the themes of this book fit well with their plans for Oprah’s new program Super Soul Sunday.

It’s just about one month before the publication of my new book A Religion of One’s Own. Now the marketing and publicity begin, important aspects of a writer’s life, where a book finds real completion by being seen, held, read and, the writer hopes, passed on to a friend or relative.

They look at the night sky / sometimes through glass, / or maybe they have forgotten / about the actual sky and instead / read horoscopes and calculate birth charts.

A number of years ago Marianne Williamson asked me to write a chapter on the future of religion for a book she was editing. I tried, but at that time I wasn’t ready to tackle the question. Now I am.