If you want to enjoy his work with pop-sensibility in the delivery I recommend checking out “I’m Your Fan”[0], where you can enjoy heavy weights like R.E.M. and The Pixies and a bunch of other really excellent bands interpreting Cohens really excellent songs.
I have a ridiculously completist collection of Cohen-related material (although far from complete). Another roughly contemporaneous tribute album is Tower of Song. It's not as good, perhaps because it features more mainstream artists (I go to I'm Your Fan a lot more than Tower of Song), although Don Henley's version of "Everybody Knows" is a great version of that song.
Did you mean I'm Your Man? I discovered 'A Thousand Kisses Deep' some years ago through a Jackson Browne cover and it felt so strange to rediscover Cohen, when I'd stopped at the classics.
I’m your Fan is a tribute album, notable for having the John Cale version of Hallelujah which was arguably the cover that led to the song getting over-covered.
I don’t know if this a generally accepted definition, but to me spirituality is guided only by direct first-hand experience, while religion is a set of beliefs from some other humans or books written by humans. Spiritual teachers are trying to point you towards firsthand experiences, as opposed to just asking you to believe what they say.
Obviously there is some crossover between the two - spiritual teachers might be a bit religious and vice versa.
"Spritualism" is just as man made as people claim "religion" is man made.
Some verses in the bible that indicates that the "chrisitian" religion is _not_ based on man made ideas, but instead flies in the face of them:
> "If anyone thinks himself to be religious, yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this person's religion is worthless."
> "Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world."
I think that using an argument of "spiritual" vs "religion" is a justification, not a fact.
To understand spirituality, walk into the middle of a national park and just stand there for 5 minutes.
It makes you understand why early tribes worshipped nature - it's beautiful, powerful, humbling and eternal, unlike anything man-made.
Regarding organized religion, I think some prophets had worthwhile things to say, and some didn't.
The remarkable thing about the Old Testament is how accurately it depicts both human evolutionary biology and early human civilization as understood today. Archaeology over the past 200 years basically confirms what it says. I would agree that it's the greatest book ever written.
Marxism/Communism has tried to replace the Ten Commandments with an alternate doctrine for the past 100 years, and has failed miserably.
I have a bachelor's degree in Religious Studies. Quite literally in the first week they gave us a handbook with some 120 definitions of religion. It was quite a sobering introduction to understand that the field I was going to invest 3 years in didn't have a consensus on what it is it's actually studying.
Whilst I think it's fair to say that the general perception is that religion is something more formal and perhaps more organised than spirituality, no such strict distinction holds a broad consensus in academia.
Perhaps relevant, is to consider that we even studied capitalism and communism. So not only is it unclear where religion ends and spirituality begins, but neither is it straightforward to isolate the boundary between religiousness and secularism.
Personally I think "spiritual" is generally used as an implicit value judgement to distance something religious from "religion". It's that implied distancing which, to me, is the most relevant. Leonard Cohen's Zen teacher was involved in widely publicised sex scandals. Just because somebody leans more on the spiritual side of the spectrum doesn't automatically distance them from the more traditional trappings of religion. However, I would say that implicitly distancing yourself from something does tend to ironically bring you closer to it.
I think the term "religion" has a lot more societal/organizational connotations associated with it. It touches on concepts of community, rituals, value of specific texts, proscription of certain behaviors and prohibition of others, and so on. People talk of "organized religion," but "organized spirituality" doesn't make as much sense.
Spirituality is one aspect of religion, dealing with the meaning of existence, etc. It's has a more personal and philosophical connotation.
You could have two people be members of the same religion, but have different spiritual existences.
At least that's my take on it. The terms can be somewhat fluid, though.
I've actually had the opportunity to practice a bit of zen meditation within a traditional framework (Rinzai Zen) which is very close to what Leonard Cohen experienced.
In my humble opinion, spirituality is to religion what 'passion for fitness' is to a gym. A gym is an organisation with rules, employees, a boss, location, history, etc. Some people go there in order to get a 'healthy person' identity, meet friends, and to make sure that their body image fits the attractivness metrics of the society in which they live. The actual experience of pushing iron and sweating is an inconvenient.
I took a class in Zen Buddhism while I was a student at the Claremont Colleges and there was a field trip to the Mt Baldy Zen Center (where Cohen was living as a monk at the time). Unfortunately, I was sick and was unable to join the field trip, but I also didn't know Cohen's music yet at that time.
I never had the chance to see him perform live or meet him (although again, later in my life, I lived about a mile away from him in Los Angeles and didn't know it at the time). The Live in London concert video is a must-watch. Cohen just exudes charisma in his performance. Even though I'd heard the audio dozens of time from owning the corresponding album, when I finally saw the video performance I was drawn in like nothing else.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 58.9 ms ] threadhttps://youtu.be/XH1fERC_504
My taste is somewhat eclectic so the only thing of him I knew ( and liked ) was 'Everybody knows' ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gxd23UVID7k ).
Incidentally, why is WP writing about him now?
[0] https://youtu.be/ZMBlSnCM84Q
Not all of ones idols should be worshipped blindly.
In contexts like this I can't tell what definition(s) are at play.
Obviously there is some crossover between the two - spiritual teachers might be a bit religious and vice versa.
Some verses in the bible that indicates that the "chrisitian" religion is _not_ based on man made ideas, but instead flies in the face of them:
> "If anyone thinks himself to be religious, yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this person's religion is worthless."
> "Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world."
I think that using an argument of "spiritual" vs "religion" is a justification, not a fact.
It makes you understand why early tribes worshipped nature - it's beautiful, powerful, humbling and eternal, unlike anything man-made.
Regarding organized religion, I think some prophets had worthwhile things to say, and some didn't.
The remarkable thing about the Old Testament is how accurately it depicts both human evolutionary biology and early human civilization as understood today. Archaeology over the past 200 years basically confirms what it says. I would agree that it's the greatest book ever written.
Marxism/Communism has tried to replace the Ten Commandments with an alternate doctrine for the past 100 years, and has failed miserably.
Whilst I think it's fair to say that the general perception is that religion is something more formal and perhaps more organised than spirituality, no such strict distinction holds a broad consensus in academia.
Perhaps relevant, is to consider that we even studied capitalism and communism. So not only is it unclear where religion ends and spirituality begins, but neither is it straightforward to isolate the boundary between religiousness and secularism.
Personally I think "spiritual" is generally used as an implicit value judgement to distance something religious from "religion". It's that implied distancing which, to me, is the most relevant. Leonard Cohen's Zen teacher was involved in widely publicised sex scandals. Just because somebody leans more on the spiritual side of the spectrum doesn't automatically distance them from the more traditional trappings of religion. However, I would say that implicitly distancing yourself from something does tend to ironically bring you closer to it.
Spirituality is one aspect of religion, dealing with the meaning of existence, etc. It's has a more personal and philosophical connotation. You could have two people be members of the same religion, but have different spiritual existences.
At least that's my take on it. The terms can be somewhat fluid, though.
In my humble opinion, spirituality is to religion what 'passion for fitness' is to a gym. A gym is an organisation with rules, employees, a boss, location, history, etc. Some people go there in order to get a 'healthy person' identity, meet friends, and to make sure that their body image fits the attractivness metrics of the society in which they live. The actual experience of pushing iron and sweating is an inconvenient.
“Religion is for people that believe in hell. Spirituality is for people that have been there.”
I did later play in a band which performed a rendition of Everybody Knows by Cohen and his frequent collaborator Sharon Robinson https://don.dream-in-color.net/music/mp3/01%20Everybody%20Kn...
I never had the chance to see him perform live or meet him (although again, later in my life, I lived about a mile away from him in Los Angeles and didn't know it at the time). The Live in London concert video is a must-watch. Cohen just exudes charisma in his performance. Even though I'd heard the audio dozens of time from owning the corresponding album, when I finally saw the video performance I was drawn in like nothing else.