Religion Dispatches
…he makes a lot of his one big win, when, late last year, he predicted that Best Buy would jump from $11 a share to $40. Currently Best Buy is trading at around $34—not quite Hyman’s prediction, but still an impressive jump. Beyond that it’s difficult to say, though Hyman seems to have had a lot of success as an investment advisor. He claims to have more than 57,000 subscribers to his “Ultimate Wealth Report” (that’s around $2.68m) and he’s been pe…
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…at we have to “try on” alternative interpretations to see which offers the best fit with the whole of human experience—not merely with what we experience through our senses, but also with the broader and ultimately more important dimensions of our lived experience, including our moral and aesthetic experience and our sense of the numinous. Is a naturalistic worldview, one which explains away these latter features of our lives (or at least the last…
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…r the Banner of Heaven appeared the very next year, immediately becoming a bestseller. The book tells the story of the grisly murders of Brenda Lafferty and her infant daughter, Erica, at the hands of her brothers-in-law, Ron and Dan Lafferty. Though excommunicated from the LDS church, Krakauer argues that the brothers were inspired by their religious heritage. The Laffertys were the natural culmination of 150 years of history centered on blind ob…
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…eption is that yoga is a mere commodity of global market capitalism or, at best, “spiritual, not religious.” On the one hand, many outsiders to popularized yoga profoundly trivialize it by reducing it to mere commodities and impotent borrowings from or “rebrandings” of traditional, authentic religious products. On the other hand, many insiders frequently avoid categorizing yoga as religion, preferring to call it spiritual or to invoke other non-ex…
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…For a lot of reasons, conservative Christians tend to own the cultural megaphone today. (Most important among them: conservative judges endorsing extremist conservative Christian arguments.) So I don’t expect the average person to understand all the nuances. But journalists covering national politics, especially those on the Trump beat, need to do better. Here’s why. First of all, it’s a matter of accuracy. As Sarah Posner points out on Bluesky, t…
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…much more support from the European states than it does from America. In a number of countries, Catholic schools are subsidized by the state and in some Catholic agencies even receive a defined share of taxes for overseas development projects. The European Union and the Overseas Development agencies also provide large amounts of money for Catholic projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There have been sporadic attempts to cut off such funds…
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…can combine with a requirement of clerical celibacy to produce inordinate numbers of priests whose sexuality has become deeply dysfunctional by virtue of failed adolescent efforts to suppress it altogether. But any impulse to reflect seriously on these and other ideas will be compromised if the opposing impulse prevails—by which I mean the Church’s deep-seated impulse to react defensively, to respond in terms of its subjective sense of being besi…
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…its more colorful, traditional, and quaint. His framing edits out the cellphones and shopping malls in favor of the saris and oxcarts. In small doses that’s fine, Cole writes. But in aggregate, it becomes a kind of thesis: Any given photograph encloses only a section of the world within its borders. A sequence of photographs, taken over many years and carefully arranged, however, reveals a worldview. To consider a place largely from the perspecti…
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…s, and single-issue groups that make up a loose coalition that despite the best efforts of the Religion-Industrial Complex, cheerfully and successfully resists just about anything in the way of central coordination. Jenkins sees this as a distributed movement, and likes to point to areas where it’s played a crucial role in progressive successes in recent years. (Some of his most interesting reporting has been about Indigenous religious activism ar…
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…n spend time together in the Dive smoking a hallucinatory substance which, best we can tell so far, seems to be legal—if not exactly respectable—in this society. Of course, you’ve heard the joke that you can tell you are watching a cable show if the sympathetic characters are using drugs. This imagery is still not going to be appearing on the major networks. I also continue to be very interested in some of the representations of games in the serie…
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