In today’s American culture, there is one virtue that seems to be held above all others as the one to be achieved at all costs. That is individual perseverance. And what is wrong with that, actually? After all, isn’t perseverance one of the things we are told we will learn as we go through trials?…

by Kent Ira Groff Liminality is a zone of ambivalence, ambiguity, even disorientation, as anthropologist Victor Turner’s pioneer research shows. But it’s simultaneously a “realm of pure possibility where novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise,” says Turner (The Forest of Symbols). That’s one value for practicing centering prayer, where you have no agenda…