FEATURE
ROB BELL EVERYTHING IS SPIRITUAL TOUR AUGUST 9, 2015 @ THE KNITTING FACTORY 8:30PM SHOWTIME “Soul is the thing that keeps telling you, 'There's more.'” - Rob Bell on Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul Sunday
anticipated Everything is Spiritual Tour comes to the Knitting Factory in Reno on August 9.
Rob Bell is a master teacher and spiritual provocateur of the most engaging variety. He's been vilified and publicly pilloried by his detractors, and celebrated and embraced by millions as a thought leader, reinvigorating the dialogue around the metaphysical mysteries of the soul, the afterlife and our place in the universe. Bell is a bestselling author, international teacher, and highly sought after public speaker. TIME Magazine said of Bell's controversial New York Times bestseller Love Wins,“Love Wins has ignited a new holy war in Christian circles and beyond.” Speaking on the Fox News program The O'Reilly Factor, the conservative evangelical Reverend Franklin Graham called Bell 'a false teacher and a heretic,” for Bell's views on damnation and his now notorious assertion in Love Wins that hell may not exist.
Oliver X: Tell me about what people can expect to hear and learn at your Reno tour stop.
But throughout his very public evolution (that has often-times been met with vicious condemnation by his critics), the charismatic Bell has not missed a beat, waxing poetic about his zen-like appreciation of the joys of surfing with his teenage son, while drawing parallels between the tenets of quantum mechanics and the human heart's enormous capacity for expansion and love. Bell's well-known book titles include: What We Talk About When We Talk About God, The Zimzum of Love, Velvet Elvis, Sex God, Jesus Wants to Save Christians, and Drops Like Stars. At age 28, Bell famously founded the Mars Hill Bible Church in Michigan, and under his leadership it was one of the fastest-growing churches in America. In 2011 he was profiled in TIME Magazine as one of their 100 Most Influential People. Bell was featured on Oprah’s 2014 Life You Want Tour. His highly
66 Reno Tahoe Tonight
Rob Bell: Scientists are telling us that the universe is expanding …So, what scientists are saying about the nature of the universe and what we all know about how our hearts work, is actually the same fundamental truth. When you give yourself for the well-being of another; when you expand and embrace and include and move beyond yourself, you are mirroring how the universe functions. So I'm just making this whole series of connections between every time you're criticized, betrayed, hurt, wounded, misunderstood and you try something and it fails; everything in us wants to contract. It wants to shrink back. It wants to withdraw. It wants to say, 'Why keep giving my best effort if this is how I'm going to be received.' In that moment you are doing the opposite of expanding; you're essentially going the other direction that the universe has been going for thirteen billion years. Oliver X: That's wild! On that note, what do you make of the theories that are being popularized now by scholars like consciousness researcher Thomas Campbell, Oxford consequentialist philosopher Nick Bostrom, University of Maryland Theoretical Physicist Dr. James Gates and others, that we're living in a virtual reality simulation? Speaking on the subject, Campbell said, 'We are a self-aware, individuated unit of consciousness, with an avatar called a body, living in a virtual reality universe.' Rob Bell: Fantastic! The only problem with virtual, is when you slice you're hand open with a knife and bleed