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Spokane
Thursday, March 28, 2024

Thomas Schmidt

Thomas Schmidt is a retired psychotherapist and chemical dependency counselor who belongs to the Sufi Ruhiniat International order of Sufi’s and is a drummer in the Spokane Sufi group and an elder at the Country Homes Christian (Disciples of Christ) Church. He is a member of the Westar Institute (The Jesus Seminar people). He studied for the ministry in the late 1950’s at Texas Christian Church and twice married Janet Fowler, a member of a long tern TCU family and a Disciple minister. He was active in the Civil Rights Movement, studying philosophy at Columbia University and psychology in the University of North Carolina university system. He has taught philosophy and psychology, and was professionally active in Florida, North Carolina, and, for 25 years in Spokane. He has studied and practiced Siddha Yoga, Zen Buddhism and, since the mid 1970’s, Sufism and the Dances of Universal Peace. He has three sons and three grandchildren. With the death of his wife, Janet, he is continuing their concentration on human rights, ecology, and ecumenical and interfaith reconciliation.

Your thoughts on our moral state?

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

Our Transition into a New Religious Axial Age

We are living in an exciting age, an age of axial change, moving beyond the findings discovered in the Enlightenment, beyond the descent into reactionary capitalism and beyond fundamentalism into an age of globalized religion.

On Voting on Our Theology

What better way is there? Do we let a select and limited group of special interests decide?

Ego, context and the death penalty

While some legislators may need to twist into Gordian knots to reconcile their personal opposition with their need to remain electable, all but two agreed with us --- the death penalty needs to be abolished.

No Value is Value Neutral

it seems to me that there are two differing attitudes about what purpose our writing about our values serves.

Religion Used by the State

Recently there has been much discussion, most often by conservative and ‘far right’ thinking Christians how Christianity is better than Islam, often referring to, occasionally citing, but never analyzing historically or critically , the Qur’an.

Reflections on the give and take of December’s Coffee Talk

The December Coffee Talk was full of issues to engage the mind of any one concerned with values in our troubled world.

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