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Scientology: All-American or Aging Hoax?

By Gordon Haber

…tment. A treatment that became a religion. But did Hubbard believe his own spiritual claims? Reitman strongly suggests that in changing Dianetics into the Church of Scientology, Hubbard had mercenary motivations. She places the early church in the context of the growth of the franchising model of the 1950s, noting its corporate-inspired focus on control, uniformity, and efficiency. Like a McDonald’s, individual churches, or “orgs,” bought their pr…

Will SCOTUS’s New Zeal for “Neutrality” Affect its Decision on the “Muslim Ban”?

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…ke with an anti-gay message) and refusal to sell a product to a particular customer (a wedding cake to a same-sex couple). Of course, the Court didn’t seem so concerned with clearly biased government religious expression in Town of Greece. As Justice Kagan’s powerful dissent outlines, in that case “the Town Board select[ed], month after month and year after year, prayergivers who will reliably speak in the voice of Christianity” and thereby “infus…

Occupy Francis Lewis Boulevard

By Haroon Moghul

…while listening to Russian-speaking Central Asians scream into their cell phones, all of which are so much cooler than mine; this particular virtual argument was about an order for an organic something that didn’t go through. I guess. Then halfway through my haircut, a South Asian man walks into the barbershop and sits two chairs down from me. He’s wearing a dark brown shalwar qameez, the clothes most commonly worn by people in the northwest of t…

A Mennonite on American Obesity

By Lauri Lebo

…Their very existence tends to enable the alcoholism of a portion of their customer base. The fact of the matter is that people who lack self control are often enabled in their addictions by buffets and bars. But at least bars often have a policy of not serving obviously inebriated people. Buffets will let you eat until you explode. As I contemplated the commonplace nature of obesity in South Central PA, and its prevalence among Christians and non…

SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

By Michael Schulson

…ty gospel, only in the opposite direction: a business using the tools of a spiritual community, instead of a spiritual community celebrating the values of a business. Here, too, we get the unambiguous mélange of the profitable and the ethereal. And here, too, there’s a fierce emphasis on individual improvement, in which positive thinking is linked to physical gains. SoulCycle isn’t alone in its willingness to fuse spirituality with publicly traded…

Beliefnet Readers: Are You Really Offended by the Word “Feminism”?

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…marketing analyst would devote attention to the preferences of a company’s customer base, and try to gather data on said preferences. It’s not surprising that a writer, even in these lean days, would refuse a regular writing gig which required her to adopt a very different voice than the one she’d spent years crafting. What does surprise me is this: Evidently a non-trivial number of readers of Beliefnet out there are offended by the word feminist….

A Libertarian Split Over the Hitching Post Case

By Sarah Posner

…nt as part of the business. They similarly added a new Employee Policy and Customer Agreement stipulating that the Hitching Post will only perform unions ‘between one biological male and one biological female.’” Additionally, while the Hitching Post used to offer “wedding ceremonies of other faiths,” as Jeremy Hooper documented, the website was recently changed to offer only “a traditional Christian wedding ceremony.” Sarah Jones of Americans Unit…

Advice from a Disaster Pastor: Open Your Wallet, Not Your Closet

By Carlos Wilton

…embers and friends of that big-box non-denominational church. A surprising number of cases, I noticed, were a premium Trader Joe’s brand that had been bottled in Fiji. That was quite a carbon footprint, to ease recovery from a storm that had very likely been aggravated by global warming. What if those donors had skipped their trip to Trader Joe’s and contributed money instead? Their church could have saved the cost of the delivery truck, and added…

Space X and the Photo-Op: Trump’s Use of the Bible Was Just the Latest in a Series of Christian Nationalist Messages

By Tony Keddie

…ation of pioneers, I believe, as well, there is nowhere we can go from His spirit.” Alluding to Psalm 139:10, he avowed that even in the heavens, “His hand will guide us.” The hand of God aside, Pence envisions commercial space companies building platforms “where the government will be a tenant and a customer, and not the landlord.” Pence cited this same verse from Psalm 139 to legitimate the mission of the administration’s newly formed Space Forc…

Is America Willing to Be Freed from Its Demons?

By Willie James Jennings

…a legitimate concern, a gun carried by a scared police officer or a scared customer in Target does not insure it. We create barriers by the way we construct neighborhoods, carve up communities, and channel resources, goods and services along racial lines. Such barriers feed our fears and teach us to live comfortably in the racial lies that have guided the thinking of so many Americans for centuries. We have learned to structure our fear geographic…