Respect as a Spiritual Practice
Respect, essential to all the world's religions, is universally seen as a building block to a more humane world. These articles, blogs, book reviews, poems, prayers, quotes and more offer vital discoveries and reminders of how you can incorporate respect into your way of being.

25 Reasons Why Twitter Is Spiritual
This essay shows why Twitter, the popular social networking tool, is spiritual: It encourages attention, connections, listening, meaning making, reverence, and other key practices of the world's religions.

Encouraging Children's Spirituality
Here are eight ideas to foster reverence in children by modeling and sharing with them what we know to be true about respect for things, nature, and other people.

Handle Your Things with Care
This essay suggests ways to honor your material things for their beauty, expressiveness, and creativity, an antidote to greed and waste. Ideas include creating a welcoming ceremony for a new possession, being generous to those who maintain your things, and passing your things on to others.

An Interview with Sam Keen
This interview considers the spiritual practices needed to tap into the sacred depths of ordinary moments and notes that without reverence, the human race will slide into ecocide.

Little Courtesies
"What can we do?" is a question we're hearing a lot these days. Spiritual teachers agree that what's important is that we do something, even if it's small.

On the Value of Emptying Your Cup
Reverence is a matter not only of profound appreciation for what we witness, but also of letting go of preconceptions and judgments. This allows us to be open to new teachings, new experiences, and new people.

The Path of Practice
Practice has always been the heart and soul of the world's religions, and it is also the distinguishing characteristic of today's less organized spirituality movements. As the Zen Buddhists put it, how you do anything is how you do everything. This means that all our activities can become reverent practices.

Remembering Our Dead
The ritual of reverently remembering loved ones who have passed is an important spiritual practice in all our lives. It brings death into the context of our daily experience and reminds us that dying is not the end.

Reverence for Life
The antidote to our mistreatment of each other is reverence for life -- all of life. In this mini-curriculum, we provide links to a movie, readings by Robert Fuller, Sister Dianna Ortiz, Frederick Frank, and Rabbi Robert M. Levine, and four practices.

The Shining
One would think there are enough things in everyday life to be afraid of — poverty and pain, crime and terrorism, disease and death. But the fact remains that horror films offer us a distinct pleasure — the experience of fear in a safe place. They give us a chance to deal with our paranoia about the outside world as well as the terrors which lurk within us.

Shock and Awe
There is spiritual significance in a word associated with awe: reverence. Imagine what would happen if any country tried to shock the world with its reverence.

Spiritual Practices for Difficult Times
A framework of reverence brings us fresh courage. Nine spiritual practices and an inspirational video provide inner support for times when world events overwhelm us and we feel anxious and defeated.

Spiritual Practices for Nature-Deficit Disorder
Three practices plus an e-course help us reconnect with nature, countering the irreverence of a culture that keeps steering us further indoors.

Words Matter
This feature on taming the tongue, renouncing hurtful speech, and vowing to practice right speech provides quotes, readings, and spiritual practices to create a more civil society. A related practice, Hold Your Tongue, challenges us to consciously pay attention to what we say to others, so that every word builds strong respect.

Elsewhere on the Web

1000 Awesome Things
by Neil Pasricha
This popular blog savors everyday pleasures such as "kindergarten class photos," "the three-paycheck month," and "putting a slice of lasagna on your plate and having it stay together," with a gratitude that spills over into reverence.

Awe in the Bible
by Andy Tix
Tix not only summarizes biblical passages in which people have awestruck responses to particularly powerful situations, but also points out that people would do well to be generally sensitive to the awesomeness of God. See also The Significance of Awe in Christian Experience and Everyday Mystery.

Educating with Reverence
by Kimberly Franklin and Deb Adams
Four short posts relay how important it is for teachers to imbue words and gestures with reverence for students' needs and hearts made whole by the Holy Spirit.

Finding Faith in Irreverence
by Cindy Brandt
Brandt explores irreverence as "the deep authenticity of human experience," which the Church, by and large, keeps at arm's length. Irreverence, she finds, can be prophetic, passionate, humorous, a technique for living, a way to confront power.

The First Precept: Reverence for Life
by Thich Nhat Hanh
Revered Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh comments on the first of the Buddhist Five Precepts: to cultivate compassion out of deep understanding of the preciousness of life.

How to Get the Respect You Secretly Crave
by Kimberly Key
Key maintains that lack of respect leads to living defensively, fear of others, and feelings of worthlessness. A healthy, self-respecting ego, on the other hand, is resilient, loving, empathic, creative, attentive, joyful, and always learning.

If You Don't Respect Yourself, Who Will?
by Richard and C.R. Zwolinski
The Zwolinski's make a case for the need for self-respect to enhance physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. See also Americans Want Self-Respect by Dr. Rick Nauert.

In Relationships, Respect May Be Even More Crucial Than Love
by Peter Gray
"Love without respect is dangerous; it can crush the other person, sometimes literally," writes Gray for Psychology Today. "We all need respect, especially from those who are closest and most intimately connected with us."

Learning to Live Reverently
by Gerald M. Fagin
Calling reverence a virtue to be cultivated and practiced, Fagin says that it is a disposition of the heart that leads to the good in all things and draws us closer to God." Reverence brings us closer to other people and to the world around us.

Otto on the Numinous
by Lilia Melani
Lilia explores the work of German theologian Rudolph Otto's book The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational. Otto focuses on unique experiences of majesty and dread aroused by intimations of the numinous: being in the presence of something uncanny, overpowering, and vibrantly alive.

Respect at School in Decline, Survey Shows
by Greg Toppo
Polls show negative feelings about teachers and their lack of respect for students and parents. It's all about expectations and modeling behavior.

Respect in Families
an interview with Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
Respect has many dimensions, according to Lawrence-Lightfoot: observation, attention, empowerment, and dialogue. It's built on empathy and appreciation that foster trust.

Respect: The Starting Point for Good Ethics
by Mark S. Putnam
Many adults remember being told by their parents to "respect your elders" as a burden to bear. Then this same generation adopted the mantra: "Respect must be earned." If someone didn't earn it or deserve it, they didn't get it. Putnam presents a third alternative: Ethics requires respect, which has a profound impact on your character.

Spiritual Respect
by Linda Mackenzie
Mackenzie goes beyond psychology and human limitations to consider respect as the positive life force in every living thing, responsible for such qualities as faith, trust, hope, and charity. To develop spiritual respect, she encourages us to live in the moment, let go of judgment and negative emotions, accept responsibility for our actions, be self-reliant, and reduce stress.

The Virtue of Reverence
by Donald DeMarco
Reverence allows us to have a true appraisal of God and creation, DeMarco observes, as we appreciate the great things that originate outside the small circles of our egos. In tune with the cosmos, the reverent person will never run out of wondrous experiences.

Who Are You
by Edward Hays
In this blog, Hays stands amazed at our human capacity to be "wonder immune" and suggests small steps for rekindling our ability to be astonished by the miracles all around us.

Why Our Brains Love Horror Movies
by Sharon Begley
Horror movies are cathartic, showing in their intensity a shadow aspect of reverence. They generate negative images in order to celebrate the good.

With Great Reverence and Above Reason
by Carl McColman
McColman writes about the joy of reverently beholding God, relaxing into "the boundless silence of union with Divine Love."

Read more articles about reverence curated by Frederic Brussat via Scoop.It! See pieces on teaching kids reverence, rediscovering civility, appreciating the wonders of natural phenomena, insuring dignity in the ICU, and melding reason with reverence, with more topics added all the time.