Belden lane biography

Belden C. Lane is a.
Bio.
Belden C. Lane is Professor Emeritus of Theological Studies, American Religion, and History of Spirituality at Saint Louis University.

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The religious imagineer

Osservanza Master (Siena), St. Anthony the Abbot in the Wilderness, c. 1435

“The saints I travel with are more than companions on the trail. When I’m backpacking, I listen to their silences, their laughter, their readiness to jolt me out of my distractions. Back home I ask them for their prayers, for help in understanding and interpreting them aright. We even work together at letting the wilderness take us places where neither of us might have gone before in our thinking. Ours is a vigorous, intimate discourse. We wrangle back and forth; they humble me by the depth of their passion. I sense the weight of my responsibility to them, but I love them as well. The ‘communion of saints’ is far more than a line in the creed for me. These endearing trail-weathered mavericks are my teachers––giant sequoias that fill me with awe.”

–– Belden C. Lane

The fourth and final theme of Belden C. Lane’s Backpacking with the Saints returns us to the place where we started. But we are no longer the same. The journey has changed us. “Delight (Returning Home with Gi

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There are times when the soul needs a canyon. A wide, empty space unoffended by rage, uninsulted by tears. What are canyons, anyway, but absences, losses, vast places for pouring out grief? When you see your life as a thing made of holes, you can find a strange solace in the deep ravines and towering mesas of a high-desert landscape. That’s why the haunting canyons of Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico have called to me again in the past year. I’ve needed the no-nonsense, cut-to-the-bone effrontery of a wilderness terrain.

Last January our 40-year-old son, Jon, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. He was a tattoo-covered hunk of a man, working heavy construction, having made his way to sobriety through years of addiction. His wife and daughter loved him to pieces, as everyone did who knew him. Extended rounds of chemo seemed at first to do the job. In August he was declared cancer-free. He rang the bell at the hospital. But two months later the cancer returned with a vengeance. He was dead within a week. “Babu,” my five-year-old granddaughter asked me, “what if Mommy dies l

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Belden C. Lane

WHO IS THIS JESUS who rattles my cage and rumbles through the history of my life? This contradictory figure who proves an embarrassment and stumbling block to my mind, but who won’t go away? This man who brings awe and tears to my eyes, who makes me want to resist authority when it’s wrong, who points me to a God who works from the underside of every system of power?

Who is this Jesus? Disturbing teacher of the gospels, comfortable with children and irritating to scholars, unsettling people by his enigmatic stories. Dancing member of the Holy Trinity, looking out from a stunning Russian icon. Object of saccharine devotion in the Sacred Heart of Catholic spirituality, the “Jesus and me” sentimentality of evangelical piety, the unbridled passion of 17th-century metaphysical poets.

He’s the first-century Jewish rabbi of the Jesus Seminar, calling for justice and inclusivity, making no ethereal claims about his own divinity. He’s the Jesus of Jelaluddin Rumi, who wants to be born in the mystical experience of every soul