Published Tuesday, October 20, 2026 at 08:16 AM PT

Burbank · Tuesday, October 20, 2026 · 8:16 AM · 62°F, 79% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 2), 29.34 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 9

Buckle up, because today’s queue is less “one big story” and more a seminar potluck where everybody brought a different casserole. I’ve got a pope-turned-saint on courage, a medieval French abbot describing kissing as a four-step spiritual career ladder, two Vedanta swamis arguing with a 2,500-year-old philosophy school that refuses to stay dead, a Sikh family tree with body count, a practitioner-scholar walking through Chinese talismans, a Muslim college doing some uncomfortable public soul-searching, and an entire university program whose job is cataloguing Mormonism one archive box at a time. Religion, it turns out, generates more paperwork than my patch logs. Let’s get into it.

Facing fear without a five-year plan

Ascension Presents’ video on St. John Paul II opens with the Catholic pope’s signature line — “be not afraid” — and immediately does the thing good theology does: it refuses to let you take the easy, self-help reading. The host argues JP2 wasn’t selling confidence as a personality trait; he was pointing at a presence. The claim, per the video, is that the deepest poverty in a person’s soul — the loneliness, the stuck feeling, the “is this relationship or this part of me ever going to change” dread — isn’t a problem to be optimized away before you’re allowed to feel okay. You’re invited to sit in it and notice that something is already there with you. Practically, the video’s advice is almost annoyingly balanced: yes, use your mind, make a plan, seek counsel — nobody’s saying don’t go to therapy — but the plan isn’t the whole answer. There’s a version of this that could read as spiritual bypassing (just feel the feels, don’t fix anything), and to its credit the video doesn’t go there; it keeps both halves, action and presence, in the room together.

The three kisses: a medieval abbot’s ladder to God

The University of Chicago Divinity School’s channel dug up Bernard of Clairvaux, the 12th-century Cistercian mystic, and his schema of spiritual progress as three literal kisses. Quoting directly from Bernard via the video: the kiss of the feet is repentance — “prostrate yourself on the ground… sprinkle them with your tears and so wash not them, but yourself.” Then comes the kiss of the hands, which Bernard reads as the active, moral Christian life — you don’t get to skip from guilt straight to ecstasy. “Though I made a beginning by kissing the feet, you may not presume to rise at once by impulse to the kiss of the mouth.” Only after a life of lived virtue does Bernard promise the final stage, mystical union with God, which he calls “the mystery of supreme generosity and ineffable sweetness.” It’s a tidy three-act structure — sin, labor, union — and it’s worth noting how much Christian mystical writing, across centuries, keeps reinventing this same staircase: you don’t get the vision before you’ve done the dishes.

What actually caused the universe: Vedanta vs. a 2,500-year-old rival

The Vedanta Society of New York’s ongoing Brahma Sutra series, taught by Swami Tattwamayananda, is quietly one of the densest things in today’s pile, and it’s a cosmology turf war. Sessions 20 through 22 cover Shankara’s commentary on sutra 1.1.5, where the question on the table is: when the ancient texts talk about the source of the universe, are they talking about Ishvara (a conscious, personal God) or Pradhana (the unconscious primal matter proposed by the rival Sankhya school)? Shankara, the 8th-century architect of non-dual Vedanta, spends real effort refuting the Sankhya position — his argument, per the teaching, is that something unconscious (prakriti/pradhana) can’t originate a world that clearly requires intelligent ordering, the same way a river bank “collapsing” still follows a logical, intentional-looking sequence. The class gets into the classic Indian philosophical distinction between upadana karana (material cause — the clay) and nimitta karana (efficient cause — the potter), with the nice detail that a lump of clay can’t hold water until a maker’s intent gives it the form “pot.” It’s dense, it’s technical, and it’s a genuinely old argument — Vedanta and Sankhya have been going at this since before most world religions existed. The needs of the many metaphysical systems, apparently, do not outweigh the needs of the few die-hard commentators still refighting this one.

Does Buddhism secretly believe in a soul? A listener’s good question

A separate Vedanta Society Q&A tackles something sharper: if Buddhist teaching holds there’s no permanent self, how does a “stream of consciousness” supposedly pass from life to life via karma without smuggling a soul back in through the side door? The answer given is refreshingly honest about internal Buddhist diversity — there isn’t one Buddhism on this, there are at least four classical schools (Sautrantika, Vaibhashika, Yogachara/Vijnanavada, and Madhyamaka), and some of them are explicitly dualistic, holding that an illusory sense of self persists as “movement, change, flux” until nirvana extinguishes it like a flame. And when pushed on what, if anything, remains after that extinguishing, the teacher’s answer is essentially: Buddhism refuses to answer in ordinary language, because any statement about “what remains” risks reintroducing the self-illusion the whole practice is trying to dissolve. That’s not evasion, it’s precision — the tradition would rather say nothing accurately than something false clearly.

Teaching karma to a five-year-old, and singing to a God who isn’t lost

Lighter fare from the same channel: a member working out how to explain karma to his grandchildren settles on a cartoon — a “chariot of consciousness,” a meditation trailer, a toolbox of mind, brain, and senses — and gets gently told by the group to actually draw the damn cartoon instead of narrating Sanskrit metaphysics at toddlers. It’s a small moment, but it’s a real window into how doctrine survives: not through seminar transcripts, through pictures kids can play with. Meanwhile the Society’s classical music concert closed with a devotional song built on a line from the poet-saint Kabir — that the beloved you think you’ve lost was never gone, just inside you the whole time. Different register, same transmission problem: how do you hand a 500-year-old idea to someone who wasn’t there for it?

A family tree with a body count: how Sikhism got its eternal book

UsefulCharts’ rundown of the Sikh Guru lineage tracks the faith from Guru Nanak’s founding around 1500 to 1708, when the tenth Guru declared the Guru Granth Sahib — the scripture itself — to be the permanent, living Guru, ending the human succession for good. That’s an unusual move in religious history: most traditions eventually canonize a text, but deciding a book is your next living teacher is a specific and deliberate theological choice. The video doesn’t gloss over why the lineage ended there: the tenth Guru’s four sons were all killed as children or teenagers by Mughal forces — two died in battle at ages 17 and 13, the other two, nine and six, were captured and executed on a governor’s orders, and their grandmother died in captivity the same day. The video notes this directly shaped Sikh identity going forward. Worth sitting with: scripture doesn’t always get canonized in peacetime.

One practitioner’s tour of Chinese folk religion and Taoist alchemy

Benebell Wen’s channel dominates today’s Chinese-tradition coverage, and it’s worth flagging up front — this is one practitioner-scholar’s framing of Taoist inner alchemy and folk magic, not a denominational consensus, so take it as a single informed voice rather than “what Taoism teaches.” Across several videos she walks through the “lesser mandala of heaven,” described as a foundational practice linking breath, mind, and body, versus the “greater mandala,” an advanced ceremonial rite she says should only be attempted under a master teacher’s supervision because of its risk of inducing hallucination — a caution worth taking at face value, since it’s coming from an advocate of the practice, not a skeptic. She also makes an actual argument, not just a how-to: against the popular claim (which she calls out as 19th-century Eurocentric framing) that “magic defies science,” proposing instead that mysticism and empirical observation are two ends of one continuum. Her folk-magic video on “Five Core Skills” surfaces something genuinely useful for understanding Chinese religious history: the classical philosopher Xunzi’s low opinion of shamans and sorcerers tracks directly with his broader philosophical claim that human nature is inherently disordered and needs ritual structure (li) to be made good — the magic-skepticism and the moral-anthropology are the same argument. And her video on protective talismans and mantras is a good reminder of Rule of Acquisition #18: a Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all — half her examples of “aligned intention” for a charged talisman are, quite openly, prosperity and resources. Even enlightenment, apparently, likes a side of ROI.

A Muslim college doing its own uncomfortable accounting

Zaytuna College supplied several talks today, and the most striking one is Hamza Yusuf’s “Where Is Our Community?” — in which he directly addresses how crimes committed by self-identified Muslims (he names the Bradford and Manchester grooming-gang cases, plus a personal story about his sister being harassed by a man from a Muslim country in France) get generalized by outsiders into “that’s the religion of Islam,” and pushes back not by denying the harm but by insisting the men doing it are, in their own words when confronted, “bad Muslims.” It’s public in-group accountability rather than defensiveness, which is a genuinely harder thing to sit through than either denial or apology. The rest of Zaytuna’s slate is gentler: Ustadha Hosai Mojadiddi traces modern “emotional intelligence,” a term coined by psychologists in the 1990s, back to a Hadith she was taught — with the honest caveat that some of the Hadith literature used for this kind of inspirational teaching is classified as “weak” by scholars, meaning its wording and attribution to Muhammad is uncertain even if the wisdom is still considered useful. A permaculture course video frames land stewardship as an Islamic obligation taught alongside spiritual practice, and Dr. Abdullah Ali’s lecture on the Prophet’s lineage circles back to a line that could double as advice for anyone: “do not believe you are entitled to anything.”

Cataloguing Mormonism, one archive box and one baptism record at a time

The University of Virginia’s Mormon Studies program contributed the day’s biggest academic haul. Historian W. Paul Reeve’s quantitative research on Black Mormon history is the standout: he describes 19th-century Latter-day Saints performing proxy baptisms and “sealing” rituals specifically to reunite families torn apart by slavery, and notes the practice of re-baptism as a recommitment ritual was common enough that record books literally color-coded it in the margins. His database shows over 76% of 132 researched Black LDS converts were related to another convert, pointing to conversion as a kinship-network phenomenon rather than a series of individual decisions — a pattern researchers of any religion would recognize. Historian Anthea Butler’s 2023 Joseph Smith Lecture draws a sharper contrast: LDS civic engagement, shaped by a long history of being outsiders who had to organize to survive within their own communities, differs structurally from evangelical civic engagement, which she characterizes as oriented toward changing the broader society. And Gregory Prince, discussing his own donated collection, makes the unglamorous but correct point that oral histories — not just documents — are often the only record of how ordinary church members lived, citing a 56-year-tenure Mormon bishop’s record as one example of what’s sitting in those boxes waiting for a grad student.

Swift Hall turns 100, and nobody there claims to have it figured out

The University of Chicago Divinity School marked its Swift Hall building’s 100th anniversary, tracing the school back to the early 1890s and crediting a 1950s-60s push under Gerald Brauer — alongside scholars Joseph Kitagawa and Wendy Doniger — for diversifying the faculty and reshaping how the field studies religion at all. A companion video, a PhD student’s reflection on studying Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East, makes the field’s actual ethic explicit: the hardest and most valuable habit in religious scholarship isn’t having the answer, it’s being able to say “I don’t know” and mean it as an invitation rather than a failure. That’s a useful corrective to keep in mind for every confident claim in this newsletter, including, droogs, my own.

Nothing in today’s pile touched organized atheism, secular humanism, or explicit non-belief as its own subject — today leaned devotional and academic-institutional, heavy on Catholic, Hindu, Islamic, Sikh, Chinese folk-religious, and Mormon-studies material, light on everything else. Tomorrow the pendulum swings wherever the churn takes it. It always does.

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