By Alain de Botton — 2012
The decline of religion in the West has brought a decline in community spirit. Could the secular world draw useful lessons from religious life? Alain de Botton offers new ways to find shared meaning.
Read on www.wsj.com
CLEAR ALL
Creative Growth is a place for artists with disabilities to gather, work, talk, and think without fear of reproach or dismissal.
“For your husband, your illness may have made him acutely aware of not just your mortality, but also his own.”
You not calling, as a friend, can actually compound the grief and loss they are feeling. Just pick up the phone, even if you get it wrong, just have a conversation and do your best. Your friend with cancer is still the same person they were before.
It’s natural to get defensive, but that only escalates the cycle of aggression.
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Many Euro-American Buddhists seek diversity in their sanghas and make efforts to reach out to minority groups, often with negligible results.
Includes Frequently Asked Questions about how to communicate and cope.
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Although being in a close relationship during the cancer journey can dramatically improve outcomes, the stress of treatment and the diagnosis itself can take a toll on couples, sometimes in a negative way.
You can find plenty of practical information out there about pregnancy and parenting, but what about the emotional rollercoaster and identity shift that occurs for many women and their partners when they have a child?
“Do everything you can to stay in touch,” says Janja Lalich, a sociology professor and consultant who studies cults and coercive influence and control.
I do not deny that positive experiences occur in a cult context, but what is of interest for me is the interactional dynamic found in cults that brings moral human beings to occasionally engage in insidious or demeaning behaviors, or sometimes just the plain incomprehensible.