Religion Dispatches
…treatment, save for classics like Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and more recent sociological studies like Robert Wuthnow’s God and Mammon in America. A few questions may help make the case about the intimate, if unexpressed, links between money and religion: Is the pursuit of wealth an ultimate value? Is self-worth tied to the accumulation of material goods? How do moral virtues connect to marketplace success? Is mo…
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…t religious passions pose to all that is wise and tolerant about the human spirit. Just in time for my own childhood indoctrination (one which I am loathe to disavow), Carl Sagan repeated this telling in his Cosmos TV series. Sagan followed Gibbon in associating Hypatia’s murder with the destruction of Alexandria’s famous library; with her body, away went the literature of the ancient world, lost forever. To remember Hypatia is now to take a stand…
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…aid his bones by the waterside. My favorite verse from the Bible is Genesis 1:2, “…and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” In the water is where I wrestle with God and where the truth of the universe tends to reveal itself to me. It’s home and it’s always humbling. Every July 4 since Mark left us, his friends, family, and neighbors have hosted a community paddle-out where kids, parents, and grandparents paddle to the outer reef at Bro…
Read More…uggests the opposite: We must face these tensions squarely. And so in that spirit, let me speak as clearly and as plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe we must finally confront together. Compare this to verse 49:13 of the Qur’an which says God created nations and tribes so that we may know one another and the most noble is the one who is best in their conduct. The allusion is quite obvious, and is geared towards at Muslim audi…
Read More…y. I propose the following as a sort of genealogy of the current confusion. 1) The two main political parties in the United States today are fairly loose coalitions, and since Reagan’s presidential victory in1980, the coalition that fractures worst loses. 2) Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians have been perceived to be a central piece of the center-right Republican coalition since the creation of the “Moral Majority” in 1979. 3) The landscap…
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…vez staged three public fasts, including the “Love Fast,” begun on February 14, 1968, which ended twenty-five days later with an ecumenical mass in which he broke bread with Robert Kennedy. Each of Chavez’s three public rituals was dubbed a “spiritual fast,” during which he took communion from priests and communed prayerfully with Protestant ministers, rabbis, nuns, and atheists/humanists. Despite posthumous efforts to contain Chavez within an ort…
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…various New Testament Texts (including I Corinthians 12:8-10, I Corinthians 12:28, and Romans 12:3-8). These gifts/practices include healings, exorcism, speaking and interpretation of tongues, words of wisdom, and prophetic utterances. Speaking in tongues, or glossolialia, has been considered the primary practice of Pentecostals. Today, despite the occasional outbursts of televangelists, a substantial number of Pentecostals do not engage in the pr…
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…quite intention. Madison Grant (the spokesman for “Nordic whiteness” in the 1910s and 1920s) discussed explicitly Jesus as “Nordic” as part of his attack upon immigration from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe. Klan members of his age, likewise, linked the racial body of Jesus to their racial national view. Of course, other times, the imaging is unintentional or at least never spoken. When Mormons erected the Christus statue in the middle of th…
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…f their faith in the public square. The counterfeit here is the collective spirit, the shared attitude they exhibit together (like a church). That collective spirit has very little to do with the worship of a marginalized Jew, named Jesus, who came to free the poor and oppressed. This counterfeit Christian community worships power, desires control, and imagines the world revolving around self-sufficient men (and a few women). I call it “Mad Man Re…
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…ritual universe, in which the single word ru’akh means wind AND breath AND spirit, has been lost in the spiritualizing afterlife of the Bible. Crumb’s illustrations do not merely restore the physical dimension suppressed by theologizing abstraction, at their best they convey that there are no differences between these realms, as there is none between—in one of the more charged corollaries of the distinction between Earth and spirit—sex and love. M…
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