MSI Press Blog

  Buddha is not a name but a title — it means “the awakened one,” someone who has fully understood the nature of reality and freed himself from suffering. The historical figure known as the Buddha was Siddhartha Gautama , a spiritual teacher who lived in northern India between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE. 🌿 Who the Buddha Was Siddhartha Gautama was born in Lumbini , in what is now Nepal, to a noble Shakya family. Though raised in comfort, he left his privileged life after encountering the realities of aging, illness, and death. This awakening to human suffering set him on a spiritual quest. He spent years practicing meditation and asceticism before realizing that neither luxury nor extreme self-denial leads to truth. Under the bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya , he attained enlightenment — a profound understanding of the causes of suffering and the path to liberation. 🔍 What the Buddha Taught After awakening, the Buddha spent the rest of his life teaching a path known as the Middle...

  Most people think the hardest question in religion is Does God exist? But the deeper, older, more human question is simpler and more unsettling: What do we even mean by “the Divine”? Across cultures, the Divine is not a single idea. It is a constellation — a set of intuitions, metaphors, and experiences that different peoples have tried to name with the language available to them. When we ask What is the Divine? we are really asking How do human beings encounter the sacred? And that answer changes depending on where you stand. 1. The Divine as a Person In many traditions, the Divine is Someone — relational, intentional, responsive. Christianity speaks of a God who loves, grieves, forgives, and seeks relationship. Islam names Allah through 99 attributes — Merciful, Just, Compassionate — each a window into divine personality. Judaism often avoids naming God at all, not out of distance but reverence: the Divine is too alive, too holy, too present to be reduced to a label. Her...

  Today's book excerpt comes from  An Afternoon's Dictation  by  Steven Greenebaum . This book has been in the Amazon top 100 among interfaith and ecumenical books on many occasions. PART ONE: THE CALL TO INTERFAITH CHAPTER TWO   “Religion is but a language for speaking to Me.” It’s hard to overstate how crucial this revelation was. In the 50 years of my life that preceded the revelation, that thought had never once occurred to me, now that it was laid in in my lap it made perfect sense. It made sense and answered a bucket-full of questions. The first and most pressing question it answered for me was this: if there were indeed one and only one “right” answer to the question of God and how to relate to God, why didn’t humanity know what that answer was? After thousands upon thousands of years, why were there so many differing answers? The ancient Greeks were no dummies. They’d gifted us Sophocles, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and so many other brilliant thin...