Reflections
Sept. 19, 2025
Oct. 18, 2025
Nov. 14, 2025
On Prayer: What Do We Think We’re Doing?
With notable frequency these days, when talk among friends turns to all the tragedies, injustices and challenges in the world, people express their feelings of helplessness in a familiar formula: “All we can do is pray.” Yet studies over the past decade indicate that fewer and fewer people pray regularly. That’s quite a disconnect. But underlying both phenomena is an urgent existential question: How do our beliefs about prayer determine the way we show up in the world?
Odyssey Toward Omega: Embedded Hope
Both science and religion track the mystery of the world, why it is and why it is the way it is. For centuries they honored each other’s tools and beliefs, but as science increasingly distinguished itself from cosmological myth, the tension could not hold. The chasm opened in the church’s condemnation of Galileo widened with science’s turn to materialism. Over recent decades, some from both sides have tried to bridge it, yet each favored their grounding discipline. But one man, formed in the arms of both and way ahead of his time, left a legacy of the hope engendered when faith and science are held in one hand.
Tis the Season: Grounding Gratefulness
“If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is ‘thank you,’ it will be enough,” wrote the great 14th-century German mystic, Meister Eckhart. A grateful attitude is one of our most potent tools for health, agree doctors across the board. As we approach another season in which giving, receiving and thanking take center stage, it is common practice to bring to mind the particular blessings that grace our lives. But this year, perhaps more than many, finds many lists of blessings in disarray, and the sense of gratitude endangered.
Meet Kaira
From a solid foundation in both Master of Divinity and Master of Arts in Theology degrees, Kaira has pursued her own curriculum into and through the wealth of the world’s spiritual wisdom. Indigenous and institutional, philosophical and anecdotal, from the West and from the East, Kaira has cast a wide net in her search for truth. With the soul of a monastic, she brings a singleness of mind and heart into dialogue with the world’s challenges.
In these pages and in her book-in-progress, The Grand Adventure: Bearing the Imago, Kaira offers the distillation of her decades-long journey to discover what we are all looking for – meaning, purpose and greater life – and to bring our nature as imago dei to the transformation of the world.
Kaira's Coming Book
The Grand Adventure rescues the spiritual life from a sense of settled reality and calls readers into the adventure it is meant to be. Drawing on philosophy, theology and the biblical narrative, Kaira builds an original cosmology seated in the imago dei, applies it to reenvision the Christian tradition and to bring Christianity into conversation with Asian spiritual traditions, then employs all to engender a renewed path into the world and into God, individually and collectively.