Welcome to Bering Academy
The mission of Bering Academy is “to teach ourselves and others how to recognize and develop theologies that honestly confront life’s deepest questions.” Bering Academy seeks to foster a broad community of scholar-mystic-activists through an insistence on intellectual and existential integrity, and a balance between thinking, being, and doing.
Although we are working with the symbols of Christianity and are deeply moved by the teachings and life of the Jewish Arab peasant Jesus, authenticity, grace, and existence for others are more important to us than any religious tradition or creedal statement. We welcome rebels, refugees from organized religion, atheists, and spiritual freethinkers to join us as we wrestle with this fragile mingling of joy and despair that calls us to live for each other.
Welcome to Bering Academy
Submitted by admin on Thu, 08/07/2008 - 22:54.Many of Bering Academy’s teacher/students are people who have become uncomfortable with the way that organized religions have deadened the destabilizing power of theological symbols and have transformed them into metaphysical or magical entities that offer false comfort in exchange for blind allegiance. At the same time, these people are unable to escape, deaden, or distract themselves from the pressure that works from within these symbols and the questioning it generates. Bering Academy offers such people a space where they can honestly explore this questioning alongside others whose questions both reinforce their own and unsettle them.
If you have become uncomfortable with the tidy boxes of conventional thinking offered by secular and religious ideologies of all stripes, unrestricted inquiry may be calling you. If so, we invite you to explore Bering Academy’s courses for yourself. Your questions and your passion are welcome here.
Alan Richard, Ph.D.
Dean, Bering Academy
