Growing up, I had a number of ideal dream jobs. For a while I wanted to be a farmer. Then I switched to banker. In high school I gravitated toward business and accounting. And finally, I moved into philosophy and religious studies. Along the way, I lost interest and faith in Christianity and religious experience in general. I felt that too much faith and religious testimony and experience was holding

A little over 20 years ago, I found myself getting involved in mindfulness practice at exactly the same time I dove into philosophy studies at UM in Missoula, MT, specifically into ethics. Growing up as a Catholic, then atheist, then Buddhist, I struggled a lot with questions of morality. When I was 19, I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and found myself entranced by the moral questions raised in the

Any time I write about parenting, I feel the need to clarify that I’m by no means an expert on the topic. I’m a long-time meditator and student of philosophy and religion. I’ve managed to earn a Ph.D. in religious ethics and teach religious studies, philosophy, and ethics at a handful of colleges and universities around the world. But when it comes to parenting, I’m very much a novice and

One of my favorite contemporary thinkers is a philosopher and linguist named George Lakoff. I first encountered him when I read his work, with Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought (1999) in college. At the time I was a young white male Montanan who had barely stepped outside of the state (here and there on a few vacations, including a short