The spread of the virus COVID-19 has truly disrupted our way of life, and it will surely continue to do so, even after this pandemic is over. As college and university students in the United States, we were sent back to our home towns as our in-person classes have been suspended and moved to online platforms. For all of us, the life we enjoyed attending classes and spending time with our friends came to an abrupt end. And, for some of us,  it isn’t all that bad; we still get to stay in the comfort of our homes, enjoy daily meals, [...]

I’ve been thinking about this question – ‘does gratitude to God make sense today?’ – following the deaths of three close friends in these past three weeks.  At a Center dedicated to the wisdom of religious and spiritual traditions across the world, it helps in times like these to ask the most important questions in the clearest possible form.  What do we make of gratitude to God in times like these? The divine-human connection includes the premise that we experience contradiction, chiefly between the idea of a loving deity and the daily sufferings humanity faces, as evident from specific conflict zones [...]

SU Campus | by Kurt Lorenz On this past March 23rd, Scott Berinato interviewed the foremost expert on grief, David Kessler, in an article titled: That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief.  Kessler’s comments hit a public nerve at the unsettling confluence of a lack of feeling safe today amid a lack of a sense of hope for tomorrow.  Except for specific accounts in medical and personal journals of the 1918 Spanish Flu, that pandemic is often referred to like a pin inserted on a map.  We recall it now as an event fixed securely within the constraints of time; [...]