…ual recompense. In the video message that was played before my last United Airlines flight, you expressed your desire to greet each and every passenger; you invited us to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight. If I could greet you now, I would want to know: were you unaware of the monstrosity that was about to follow? There, rising above the hiss of the pressurized air, as the video monitors snapped to the image of an engorged sun bursting from be…
…d executive secretary for the CBCI Office of Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes. Attitudes in the church won’t change until the government helps raise Dalit Christians’ social standing through reservation, he says. “Mere preaching won’t do.” But other Dalit Christians disagree with Arokiaraj. “He is the Church,” Ram Bharati says of the priest. “Church has a lot of power, resources. Why is he demanding from the government?” Bharati, an Anglican…
…ican Elite Oxford University Press, 2007 Sean McCloud, Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies University of North Carolina Press, 2007 D. Michael Lindsay opens his new book, Faith in the Halls of Power, with a story of the joining of two worlds at a posh New York event. Hosted by Rupert Murdoch “in one of Manhattan’s most celebrated ballrooms,” the event feted Rick Warren—evangelical preacher and publishing sensation—…
…described Christian entrepreneurs and the laws and regulations that govern American business. Indeed, as historian Darren Grem relates in a compelling new study, when evangelicals found the public square increasingly hostile to religious influence, they turned to corporations to enact and advance their conservative values. The Blessings of Business: How Corporations Shaped Conservative Christianity Darren E. Grem Oxford, 2016 Grem’s new book, The…
…. The common claim that hell has been on the outs in America since at least 1800 is simply untrue. If anything, 1800 represented a turning point in the other direction. The idea of universal salvation had appealed to both elites like Chauncy and common folk in the late-1700s. The promise that all humans would eventually be saved represented an extreme backlash against the dominant Calvinist notion that God chose only some for heaven. Universal sal…
…to General Motors, not its thousands of shareholders. However, with small businesses, the line between business and owner is often more blurred, creating a multitude of legal complications. When companies like Annex sue over the contraception mandate, the lawsuits are usually filed in the name of both the business and its owners, and the complaint about whose rights to the free exercise of religion are at issue can become ambiguous. Can business…
…nd others because it is evidence of ties between ancient Israel and Native Americans — which, although Beck did not say this explicitly, would also be evidence for claims (albeit recently disputed within the LDS Church) made in the Book of Mormon. Howse, on his radio show, said he was “stunned” to hear Beck “laying down Mormon teaching” and “when [Beck] started talking about the Bat Creek Stone. . . . I didn’t stay with it, it was just too weird.”…
…. Throughout the 1890s amid growing populist discontent, groups of working class and lower middle class evangelical radicals were using beliefs and practices similar to Torrey’s to challenge the rising professional classes and in some cases the entire capitalist order. So, this message of Moody’s and Torrey’s that was supposed to bring social order starts to bring disorder. By 1901, everybody was bailing on Moody and they were losing their financi…
By Randall Balmer, Anthea Butler, Evan Derkacz, Jeff Sharlet, and Diane Winston
…and unity, not just one God but one ideology, and, ultimately, one ruling class. American democracy, I argue, should be a cacophony. The irony is that fundamentalist intellectuals came to a deeper understanding of that noise during their long years in the cold. Populist fundamentalists recognized that the ostensibly moderate center excluded them, even suppressed their views, that the public square wasn’t so public after all; elitist fundamentalis…
…heir best selves.” On the other hand, scarcity is essential to SoulCycle’s business model. The classes may be open to anyone “regardless of their…profession,” but I somehow doubt that sanitation workers outnumber investment bankers in SoulCycle studios (one of which is across the street from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Tribeca). Classes with popular instructors sell out in minutes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get…
