A hundred thousand welcomes…
We are so excited that you found our website…. Our official launch was December 24, 2009, Christmas Eve. Since then, many have found and enjoyed our message of “first, do no harm.” The Center for Non Harming Ministries is dedicated to providing resources for the non harming healer of all denominations and faith traditions in an open, friendly, ecumenical, welcoming way. We imagine, since you found us, that you are already...
Celebrating Life
Here is Jan, whom we had the honor to meet this weekend in Calistoga. Jan is 77, and he is Dutch. He has survived cancer, and his response is to spread joy, with his little black dog, who seemed very content to be along for the ride. If you look closely you’ll see a little ‘cancer sucks’ pin somewhere on his fanciful bike. “They told me to go fly a kite” he jokes, pointing at the butterfly kite he has added, ”so I...
Church and state… how do we navigate?
Who needs God? Without God, can a secular society find its way towards any right relationships, between self and others, employers, our earth and seas and skies? Is there a third way, between the totalitarianism of the radical secular extremes and the totalitarianism at the radical religious extremes? At nonharming.com, we certainly hope so. While Church and state should be separate so that all may have their freedom, it sometimes feels that, to...
Pledge
The Center for Non Harming Ministries is pleased to offer an entirely voluntary pledge of non harming. Non harming ministers are interested in widening the circle of compassion until none are outside its walls.
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Referral
Our links pages include a growing number of ministries that work hard at non-harming and welcoming. There may still be a need that has not been met by our online list, and if so, we are here to help.
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Helpful Hints
When in doubt, choose to err on the side which will do the least harm to the individual. And work to maintain privacy at all levels, even professional to professional. ReligiousTolerance.org has given us this to consider: Where many belief systems differ from each other and science has input, and where there is a significant chance of death to an individual, perhaps that dogma might be reevaluated.
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Background
Our greatest strength in our call to healing may come from our recognition that we’re fallible, and that we, too, suffer. In the Hippocratic Oath and the Ethics of Medicine, Steven Miles notes that swearing by Apollo linked the physician to a ‘moral song’ and “reverberates to a cosmology that sings of the origins, purposes and limits of medicine.” [1]. This is because, according to the legend,
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