Suggesting that a technology represents progress in any meaningful, moral sense would require understanding the values of the people affected by the technology.

When we engage in spiritual practice, we have placed ourselves on the stove and turned on the heat. If our practice is halfhearted, then it takes time for that low temperature to transform us. If we practice wholeheartedly, the higher temperature brings us more rapidly to a boil. Either way there is a period when nothing seems to be happening.

Sanga, as it’s known in Hindu and Buddhist circles, is community on steroids: deep “association” with pilgrims on a spiritual path—more than just post-worship potlucks, Sunday School check-ins, and church gossip. Sanga is walking and wrestling in order to grow together. Sangas don’t swerve from the big questions: who are we in relation to God? What is our purpose? How might we serve?

The atheist spring that began just over a decade ago is over, thank God. Richard Dawkins is now seen by many, even many non-believers, as a joke figure, shaking his fist at sky fairies. He’s the Mary Whitehouse of our day.

All the ladies should try to be like Gangamata Thakurani. She never even dreamed of marrying any worldly person. I have come to help you to become a devotee like this.

Gaudiya Vaishnavism is not a religion. It is a lifestyle. Unlike other traditions, ours is one of ego effacement. It is a practical path where one gradually replaces one’s physical identity with a spiritually focused one.

The purpose of the parampara is to keep the force of bhakti alive in the world and to find ways to attract people to the practices and ideals of true spirituality. If strategies from the past are getting in the way of this objective, they need to be renovated or disbanded to increase the receptivity of the public.

In the following excerpt from Sermons of the Guardian of Devotion Srila Sridhara Maharaja begins to speak about some of the numerous events that make Vasanta-pancami an especially holy day.

In honor of Swami B. V. Tripurari’s 63rd Vyasa Puja celebration, the following lecture on the subject of spiritual masters is adapted from a lecture given by Huston Smith in 2003.

There are those times in our lives when God seems distant, even absent from us.

The most urgent issue we humans face is how we conceive ourselves — whether as complex lumps of matter guided by the so-called blind, meaningless laws of nature, or as creatures who, although physical, are also imbued with something more: consciousness…