Religion Dispatches
…ure, imagine that! We also have the notion of resurrection but not just in spirit, but in body too. In fact, the Qur’an says, even if you take the dead and throw pieces hither and yon, the pieces will all come back together to face the Judgment. But again, every one will be brought to final Judgment, no gender distinction. Now, you’d think it would be like passing an algebra test, but it’s not. Because there are things that weigh in here, unlike y…
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…s hooked. I count my dates of entry from these two points: Thanksgiving day 1972 when I said shahadah, and March 1973, when I was began reading the Qur’an. For some time after that, all I read was Qur’an. Still today if things get freaky I return to just reading the Qur’an. Knowing it was originally in Arabic, I began studying Arabic through the local mosques until I could register for a course at my undergraduate University of Pennsylvania. In fa…
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…enly realms, but in the traditional depiction of them, they are not vague “spiritual” places like the amorphous afterlife of Hereafter but actual places, albeit very different from any we usually know. Enter the Void is about the supernatural, but in a way it’s entirely naturalistic. The closest thing Hereafter presents as an authority figure, a Swiss hospice worker, says that she was once a skeptic, but was convinced over twenty years of working…
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…ng of a folk hero for his courage and was widely believed to have enormous spiritual powers. He appeared in advertisements for a popular brand of sports drink together with nationally known athletes. The advertisements suggested a relationship between the athletes’ physical prowess and Mbah Marijan’s spiritual power. I met Mbah Marijan only once, less than two months ago. He was a very deeply religious man in a very Javanese way. He was a pious Mu…
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…ural) is that which curbs what we today might call “nature” in the name of spiritual discipline. Yes, Paul replaces physical circumcision with spiritual, but in doing so he creates a far more insidious apparatus of control. This is a nature of anti-nature. Ironic, then, that many of today’s anti-gay voices call homosexuality “unnatural” in a pseudo-scientific sense. They are wrong; Paul is right. Homosexuality is entirely too natural, found in ove…
Read More…ice-weekly practitioner of Bikram Yoga, the infamous 26-posture, 90-minute, 105-degree brand of hot yoga introduced to America and copyrighted by the eponymous Bikram Choudhury. Copyrighted? Yes, Bikram copyrighted his sequence of 26 postures, much to the chagrin of critics who say you can’t own sacred knowledge. But in the legal filing to copyright yoga, Bikram’s attorneys characterized yoga not as a religion but as something akin to a dance rout…
Read More…ack into serfdom, unemployment benefits expired, and in a bid to bring the spirit of peace and generosity back to Christmas, Republicans threatened to filibuster the START treaty until tax cuts for the upper 2% of wealthy Americans were made permanent. Oh, and like a maraschino cherry high atop a lollapalooza of suck, we find out from Wikileaks that the Obama administration—with GOP help—basically has quashed the investigation into torture by slow…
Read More…ing whatsoever is to be added to this, whether by “new revelations” of the Spirit or by the traditions of man.” [emphasis in the original] Certainly homeschoolers are not monolithic; in fact the earliest years of the movement were dominated by lefties who rejected public education for its stifling regimentation, favoring what they often referred to as unschooling. But by the beginning of the twenty-first century homeschooling has become an industr…
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…effect? It was with this ideas in mind that numerous studies throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s sought to determine whether religious practices such as prayer were healing forces whose efficacy could be verified through clinical trials and modern science. But, in 2006, the largest and most ambitious prayer study to date (led by the cardiologist Herbert Benson) indicated that patients who were prayed for (and were told about it, giving th…
Read More…g on the soul. The title of this episode, “TS-19″ referred to “Test Subject 19,” an unfortunate victim of the zombie infliction who allows scientists to monitor his brain as he goes from human to zombie. The scientist doing the computer recording, Dr. Jenner, narrates the changes he sees as the infection progresses. He makes a distinction between “the first event,” or infection leading to death, and a “second event” or “resurrection event” that ma…
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