Religion Dispatches
…he elected readers for their generation, offered a way to crack the hidden codes of divine scripture. In most cases, the very belief that a given reader of the Apocalypse had been divinely appointed carried with it the clear implication that those times must be very close. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need such a close and spiritually esoteric reading at all. If that is, roughly speaking, how such apocalyptic calculations have looked and behaved in the…
Read More…a divine guiding hand. And the phrase “sudden appearance” and “stasis” are codes for the Genesis account of creation in which living creatures didn’t evolve, but appeared fully formed in the Garden of Eden. The new revisions also eliminated the reference to the age of the earth; it originally said, “about 14 billion years ago.” Now it only says, “current theories of the evolution of the universe including estimates for the age of the universe.” Th…
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…lows its own members to divorce and remarry. The church has strict dietary codes, prohibiting coffee, tobacco, and alcohol, which presumably will not be available in heaven, but sees no need to legislate against their sale, even in Utah. There is the assumption that however wicked or wrong a certain behavior might be, it need not overwhelm the efforts of the Latter-day Saints to be righteous, and that, furthermore, God can adequately judge and pun…
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…ps with the spiritually vulnerable are monitored. Helping professions have codes of conduct, professional associations, and other means of making sure their practitioners are on the up and up. Roman Catholicism needs the same. It will never happen without structural changes. Here’s How it Works… The clerical culture that arises from and permeates the Roman Catholic Church is a key part of the noxious mix in which hundreds of thousands of people ar…
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…ifferent personas, test different scenarios, and imagine alternative moral codes through which she might navigate the challenges of her day-to-day existence. She has the option of taking risks, dying, rebooting, and exploring another course of action: “I think I’d better think it out again.” While young people have often found it difficult to anticipate the future consequences of their current actions, the game offers her a powerful tool through w…
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…C) from the very beginnings of the denomination: their holiness and purity codes in the early 20th century forbade the processing or pressing of hair (like Madam C.J. Walker’s revolutionary hair-straightening process.) As the denomination grew in cities during the 1940s, straight hair became the currency of charismatic authority and power for the church mothers and pastors’ wives. Lighter skin, straighter hair, and European features became a preci…
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…uctive technology than the Torah, Talmud, or our medieval and early modern codes could have imagined! Certainly, some things possible in our world had been sufficiently anticipated by earlier Jews that we have a basis for discussion; there were forms of birth control mentioned in the Talmud, for example. And there are even intimations of the questions raised by, say, in vitro fertilization. One ancient text asks about the status of a baby conceive…
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…ing death and destruction to innocent people, that disregards our laws and codes of conduct, and that is prone to acts of violence beyond the pale of civilized society. At least this is the message we are hearing more and more frequently in the news, especially in the wake of President Obama’s recent statements; views espoused by religious and political leaders as well as average American citizens fearful of Muslims abroad and at home. Hatred of I…
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…and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has similarly criticized such practices. Western appropriations of non-western traditions that emphasize mindfulness, inner peace, disinterest, non-attachment, and so on function for Žižek as “the paradigmatic ideology of late capitalism.” That is, they “represent the most efficient way for us fully to participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity.” Mindfulness practices, in ot…
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…e President is given some introduction and instruction on the holy site by Western Wall rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch and Western Wall Heritage Foundation director Mordechai Eliav. After some urging, he walks slowly—solemnly?—to the wall, where he raises his right hand and presses it against the stone. We, as viewers, hear the staccato buzz of camera shutters as Trump seems to stare ahead, head unbowed, swaying backwards and forward in what looks like…
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