Category Archives: Life style

About Spirituality as a life style. Food, sex etc.

Will, diet, renunciation and religion

By Katinka Hesselink - All Considering | May 27th, 2009

Traditionally the main religions have advocated renunciation in one form or another. Whether it’s the fasting for Lent or the day time fast in Ramadan – lay people have been stimulated to restrain their appetites at one time in the year. For religious professionals – like monks, nuns and priests – renunciation was a full [...]

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Seduction, advertisement and black magic…

By Katinka Hesselink - All Considering | February 18th, 2009

The advantage of having a spiritual blog are, among other things, that I get free copies of spiritual books occasionally. So far that’s limited to spiritual fiction though, in my case. And it’s not exactly the best fiction I get sent home for free either. I recently received ‘The Happy Soul Industry‘ by Steffan Postaer. [...]

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Environmentally aware – spiritual virtue no. 7

By Katinka Hesselink - All Considering | February 12th, 2009

Is this a cliche? Is environmental consciousness a central spiritual value? Or is it only a virtue when people act on it? In any way it’s the most modern of values on my list. A century ago the concept hardly existed – although of cource air and water pollution are as old as the industrial [...]

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Generosity and detachment – spiritual virtue no. 5

By Katinka Hesselink - All Considering | February 10th, 2009

Generosity is, for once, a classic virtue. In Islam it’s called Zakat: the duty to give a percentage of your possessions to the poor.
Generosity is linked to another classic virtue: detachment. In both Hinduism and Buddhism attachment to stuff, money and status is seen as a problem. Letting go of that in the form of [...]

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Thinking for yourself – spiritual virtue no. 2

By Katinka Hesselink - All Considering | February 4th, 2009

Of all the virtues and values I’m discussing in this series, thinking for yourself is probably the least ’spiritual’. A lot of people associate spirituality more with ‘intuition’ (or even emotion as some have noted in the comments) than with thinking. Yet thinking for yourself is a central concept in many new religious movements. It [...]

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