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Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed” Depicts Death Struggle Between Hope and Despair

…for destroying those who destroy the earth. It seems pretty clear that the spirit of radical mystic Thomas Merton hovers over this film. Merton’s name comes up twice in the screenplay, and both Schrader and his protagonist seem to resonate with the words that Merton wrote in 1962 to Ernesto Cardenal, the Nicaraguan theologian, poet, and revolutionary: The world is full of great criminals with enormous power, and they are in a death struggle with e…

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Cafeteria Christianity in the Age of Social Media: What’s Old Is New Again

…o Germanic Christians; the break-up between Eastern and Western churches in 1054 was largely a matter of Roman intolerance of Eastern variety; and medieval inquisitions existed for the purpose of cracking down on unlawful Christian variations. This is to say nothing of the picking and choosing unleashed in the 16th century by Luther and his ilk. (What could be more ironic than any Protestant pointing fingers at anyone about picking and choosing?)…

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Is the Satanist Behind 10 Commandments Challenge Sincere?

…hosts, dubious psychotherapists, “cult cops,” and Christians interested in spiritual warfare sent America into hysteria over Satanic conspiracies that resulted in innocent people being prosecuted and imprisoned. Greaves initially assumed stories of criminal Satanists must have some basis in fact. He sought out self-identified Satanists, meeting a priest of the Church of Satan and even former members of The Process Church of the Final Judgment. Whi…

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Evangelical Groundhog Day: The ‘Times’ Identifies the ‘Religious Fervor in the American Right’ — Around Four Decades Late

…re drawn from even older streams of evangelical politics, especially in the 1920s and 1950s). The specific sort of evangelical politics reported upon is now three generations deep—it is a maturing political-religious movement. To depict it otherwise is to miss the point. Why do conservative evangelicals love Trump, live in an alternate information universe, and believe that a great revival is at hand? They believe it because it is the world they w…

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Walt Whitman’s Sacred Democracy

…f American spiritualists-in-letters—was ultimately a psalmist of the human spirit. He was, as we would now say, “spiritual (or sacred), not religious.” But then, in his judgment, that’s what democracy is all about. The very coin of the democratic realm is “sacred.”  Whitman saw the work of fostering such a “religious democracy” as the work of the 20th century, and that task continues unabated today. He warned that there was only one thing that rea…

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On Eve of Sudan Split Clashes Continue

…William talks about crossing the Egyptian desert, he talks about the Holy Spirit. He remembers Pentecost, when, in the Christian Scripture, the first apostles received the guidance of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem. William, however, didn’t make it to Jerusalem or to a university. After he crossed from Egypt into Israel, border guards took him to immigration prison. Months later, he was handed over to an Israeli employment agency to be a source of…

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The Other, Forgotten Apocalypse of 2011

…arnate in the form, respectively, of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The man reputed to be the Holy Spirit allegedly died when he flung himself off a cliff, believing he would have the ability to fly. Later, in the early years of the Vietnam War, another movement spread which proclaimed that Christ would return, perhaps wearing American clothes and distributing firearms. These rather cursory comments indicate that over the course of…

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AR-15 Lapel Pins are More Than Political Provocation — They’re Symbols of the Violence at the Heart of White Christian Nationalism

…nity” originated as a youth movement. The core principle was that a strong spirit required a strong body as well—a principle that made its way to the US and was fused with the frontier spirit and Manifest Destiny, as historian Peter Manseau explains: “All of this might seem far removed from holiday cards, until one recalls that it is Jesus himself who has been proposed as the exemplar of the ‘manly and virile’ faith found at the root of Christmas…

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What This All-Star Christian Movie Gets Wrong About Christianity

…that he was so moved by it, so shaken, that it can only have been the Holy Spirit. I don’t think I overstate things when I suggest that the screenwriters mean for us to interpret their movie by the same rubric. The movie moves us… or, well, it moves the people it was intended for. Aha, that must be the Holy Spirit at work! Theologically, though, such a rubric is entirely wrongheaded. If my mind should generate some pious-sounding blurt, and if I s…

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Why Go to Church If You Don’t Believe Anymore?

…fe? Who would design this? In the end, Jesus resigns himself, commends his spirit to God in faith. Was his faith rewarded? Will ours be? I want to know: how did Jesus really feel when it was over? Was it all worth it? Did he come to life again, not in body (that belief is fast becoming myth even in Christian circles) but in spirit? Will we? The service finished, I head out of that beautiful garden at the back of the church toward the street, in th…

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