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Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…sts who follow the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh, the problem is not the availability of religious texts online, but rather the spiritual temptations that new media poses in its ability to distract monks from meditation and study. This concern has prompted the Plum Village community in France to adopt a revision to monastic rules that had remained unchanged since the time of the first followers of the Buddha. The “Revised Pratimoksha,” warns that a…

Power Up: Turn Off the Cell Phone

By Daniel Schultz

…t doing, as the effect technology has on the community: Why not make life easier and just put [a phone] in the house? “What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It’s not just how you use the technology that concerns us. We’re also concerned about what kind of person you become when you use it.” Just so. Sigh….

“Saints Are Only Human”: Leaving the Church, But Heeding this Pope’s Lessons

By Elizabeth Colmant Estes

…opened at ten in the morning and closed at 2pm—but mass would not start until after 4pm. Children in Catholic school uniforms held their parents’ hands. A host of chatty young nuns tucked iPhones into the pockets of their steely gray habits. Absolutely no protest signs were allowed, yet church groups with people who spoke Spanish sported bright T-shirts with slogans about immigration reform. On line I heard that parishes with large numbers of undo…

We Went Through Amoris Laetitia Section by Section So You Wouldn’t Have To

By Anthony Adams

…he outside of a (hetero-normative) family, and how even couples that are childless can still be open to the “meaning” of procreation. This is the kind of bad poetry that elderly celibates often produce. Skip this part or risk becoming infuriated by it. In the sections that follow, he continues to wax on about what defines a good (and evidently hetero) marriage: In Section 125, Francis says that marriage is a “friendship marked by passion,” but he…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…a-old practices of meditation are not necessarily equivalent to hair-and-nail care. Answer number two: the non-religious bit aside, those kinds of places already exist, and they are called temples. Rinzler and Burrows came up with a third answer, which is why they’re now the owners of a much-buzzed-about new business in Greenwich Village, whereas I’m still a freelance journalist, hustling for gigs. Rinzler and Burrow’s new meditation studio, MNDFL…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…ce education. Expelled can be seen, in some senses, as a product of that failure; a failure to teach science as a process that has much power but also significant limitations. If the ‘creation/intelligent design/evolution controversy’ is a window into the American soul, then that window looks into the public school science classroom. This is where the odd, vituperative dance of religion and science has played out ever since the Scopes Trial in Ten…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very little are not the abusers of cheap grace, but that others in well-feathered nests who are preaching sacrifice might be in real trouble on the cheap grace front. Obama cannot and should not condemn those in the electorate who buy into Romney’s “there will be showers of blessing” message, but he probably does …

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…—it is an offense against all those who were murdered over the centuries. Diluting the meaning of the term ‘antisemitism’ is, itself, antisemitic. Second, as I described in a recent post, there is indeed a structural similarity between some of the Occupy movement’s concerns and historical antisemitism. Occupy is, indeed, protesting against the malefactors of great wealth and their international cabals of political-financial interest. Add the word…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…er of actual Catholics, comprising a shadow church of lost adherents that will trail Francis as he moves through former Catholic strongholds like New York and Philadelphia that have closed churches by the dozen. And the numbers make it clear that the Catholic rate of disaffiliation isn’t an artifact of the general trend toward non-affiliation; in fact, it’s the other way around: the unprecedented number of Catholics leaving the church is a major d…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…ilts, crinolines, and ballet tutus are in; nudity and body paint are in; utili kilts are popular, as is wearing underwear as outerwear.” At Burning Man, bodies become works of art alongside giant sculptures and temples adorned with repurposed objects. All of these visual cues work together to signal to Burners that they have entered a reality far removed from the one they left at home. As unique as Burning Man might seem to participants, it has a…