ITEMS OF INTEREST February 25, 2008 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

with contributions from G. Jeffrey MacDonald, L. Gregory Jones

A SURVEY released last week of 1,400 US adults who haven't attended religious services in six months found that 72 percent nevertheless believe that "God, a higher or supreme being, actually exists."...

To many people, focusing on their "inner life" means cultivating a closer relationship with God, perhaps by developing a meditation or prayer practice or developing other spiritual disciplines. To others, it may be a more secular quest for tranquility and connectedness.

"An inner life is something everybody has, but we lose touch with it," says Bill Dietrich, executive director of the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Bethesda, Md. As Americans, "our lives don't support a contemplative lifestyle" so much as "a constant search for efficiency. We've got to have some way of breaking through to what's really important for us, and spiritual discipline helps us to do that."

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