For the past two weeks a bunch of folks (including myself) have been having a great, vigorous discussion around evolutionary spirituality on Bergen's Bricolage piece called Should Evolution Be Taught in Schools? Ask Miss USA. The quality of the conversation is exactly what I'd hoped for when we conceived of and began building Beams, a rich, robust and respectful conversation where differing views are given the space to be heard, and where the type of mutual listening and honest exchange actually engenders movement on the topic. Sweet action.
In light of that conversation, I wanted to offer a couple of more recent resources around the topic of evolutionary spirituality. The first is from Esalen Institute co-founder Michael Murphy, the 81 year old dynamo that keeps going and going. I've heard him talking recently about an essay he's been working on about the evolutionary spirituality lineage, which he's put under the broader (and slightly more technical/theological) term Evolutionary Panentheism. That essay is now available online for free, and it's worth a read. You can 
access it here. You can also listen to Murphy in conversation with Terry Patten on the same topic; he covers much of the same territory, but there is more, and sometimes it's nice to hear it all through a human voice. You can access that here (scroll down to find Murphy's interview). Here's a couple of passages from Michael Murphy's new essay that particularly struck me:
"Here I would like to propose that the worldview represented by thinkers such as these constitutes a canon of sorts, a body of insight that will increasingly capture the world’s imagination. The essential set of ideas that comprise this developing line of thought has fundamental implications for philosophy, psychology, religion, and everyday life. For example: it helps us understand our spiritual yearnings. If the entire universe presses to manifest its latent divinity, then we must share that impetus, which is evident in our desire for the illuminations, self-existent delight, self-surpassing love, and sense of greater identity we experience in our highest moments. The break with old habits that such moments can bring, with their openings to new inspirations and freedoms, leads us naturally to see that our world harbors a life that exceeds our ordinary reckonings".
"One reason that evolutionary panentheism has continued to attract thinkers with disparate temperaments, background, and philosophic commitments is that it is based on just a few fundamental principles, among them: first, that evolution is a fact (though its discovery has given rise to various theories about it); second, that our universe arises from and is constituted by a world-transcending supernature, call it God, Brahman, Buddha-Nature, Allah, Geist, or the Tao; and third, that humans are agents of the divine unfoldment on Earth".
And the second resource is a video that was apparently put together quite recently, called 'The Cresting Wave of Evolutionary Spirituality'. It's worth a viewing, it always somehow manages to get me a little choked up. enjoy.
