Religion Dispatches
…ning for him, but it serves as a powerful cultural symbol to unite diverse European tribes into a pan-European community. His Christianity is political and disconnected from actual devout practice—yet Christendom it is, rather than any secular foundation of European politics. The idea of a Europe that is allegedly culturally homogenous because it shares a single Christian heritage, and the claim that European countries are under siege from a viole…
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…te differences. That’s the thing—once a story gets told it calcifies… What Europeans don’t quite get about Americans is the nature of Christianity here. In Europe, people (whether they’re believers or not) still associate the church—whether Calvinist or Catholic, or anything else—with clear authority figures. Whereas in America it’s much closer to, well… capitalism. One thing that struck me, traveling through Texas, was that you look at billboards…
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…mocracy which then passed through the Roman Empire to Europe. Even as Benedict praises Europe’s democratic identity for openness to “the values of outsiders,” he paints a portrait of a White, European Christian past, present, and future to the exclusion of all others. Just as Europe’s Christian roots are responsible for its democratic ideals, Benedict also believes that Europe’s contemporary state of crisis arose from the loss of Western Christian…
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…xplicit steps to stem the Muslim immigrant tide allegedly sweeping Western Europe, ravaging its European culture, and threatening the future of Western civilization. For those who thought that Samuel Huntingon was an alarmist, Christopher Caldwell makes him look like a benign, minor prophet. The latter appears to be saying: “It’s not about the clash of civilizations, dummy, it’s about the near-term victory of the enemy stranger over the helpless n…
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…the table during meals. And during yoga on the first night, our yogi took pictures with her phone as we attempted the warrior pose. Was I back in Los Angeles? Why wasn’t this different? The staff—all devotees of the Ananda movement, a Hindu spiritual fellowship founded in northern California during the late 60s—only reinforced feelings of familiarity. There was Jemal, the dreadlocked, Yale-educated monk who waxed philosophic about the “sublime” be…
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…good move. When I got to the lobby another something told me to dig out my phone and check it for messages. Sure enough, I had one from an unfamiliar number. A woman’s voice said Bedi was still sleeping, exhausted from the previous day’s overseas flight, and needed to reschedule our interview for that afternoon. I called the number back, convinced the opportunity was lost. “I’m here at the hotel now, but I’m booked solid this afternoon—” “Hold on,…
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…y from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at reduced price; cheap wares for cheap faith. It would be an error, however, to fully dismiss pop culture angels. Despite the fact that representations of angels in film and television, comics and music, paperback novels and posters, are filtered through market concerns, such pop culture can still speak to human meaning—and because of that they merit our attention. Besides, the bulk of art…
Read More…half. There were still probably 80 empty seats, and it was clear that some number of attendees had free tickets. The largest financial supporter of the event was a local news/talk radio station and its representatives were the only media allowed in. As I arrived with my Religion Dispatches press badge they stopped me before I even got to the door. I chatted with an AP reporter and he said AP had been trying for weeks to gain media access—but that…
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…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…
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…church, they’re marinating, so to speak, in the the various teachings of a number of people. I’ve covered many an event where I’ve been waiting in line to get in, and the inevitable conversation with the people around you goes something like this: they ask first where you go to church, and second which teachers you admire, and then you get into a long conversation about the relative virtues of all of them. A really good example of how all these te…
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