Author: Dan Ellsworth

Spirituality is Addition and Subtraction

Spirituality is part addition, part subtraction.
In the West, we tend to focus on the addition part: doing things, getting things, and achieving things. That is not necessarily bad, but in our focus on addition, we can sometimes inadvertently add things that are not healthy, like perfectionism. We can also fail to account for our Western worldview and how it impacts our spirituality.

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It’s good to have cognitive ground rules

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

-David Foster Wallace, This is Water

If we don’t have some basic principles and ground rules that we adhere to, it’s very possible to think our way into delusion and confusion and all kinds of mental problems. A recent conversation about depression led me to ask myself about my own cognitive ground rules, including the ones related to my thinking around faith. We sometimes call these assumptions, and these are the ones I choose to adhere to.

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“If the Church were following Jesus, it would give all its funds to the poor!”

“Why doesn’t the church give tons of money to the poor?”

I’m currently developing an article about fundamentalism, and how its core impulse is to avoid cognitive dissonance no matter what.

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