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Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…ss groups. “…they want spiritual goods, but within the protective, customer-is-in-charge framework of commercial consumption.” Wilson, the Buddhism scholar, argues that this approach to spirituality serves a market in which people “want the benefits of religion, but not the downsides of religion.” “They want the meditation practice, on demand, to provide them with health, and peace, and calmness,” Wilson told The Cubit. “But they don’t want the su…

We Went Through Amoris Laetitia Section by Section So You Wouldn’t Have To

By Anthony Adams

…ther and a mother, without which a child is just a “plaything.” In Sections 179 and 180, Francis praises the generosity of couples who adopt children, but he refuses to include same-sex couples in that praise. For those waiting to hear what he has to say about the headline issue of divorced and remarried Catholics being barred from receiving Communion, he begins to “go there” when he condemns those who are judgmental and divisive, saying in Sectio…

Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

By Eboo Patel

…d a black-only meeting to discuss racism (in collaboration with the African-American principal of the school), particular identities were marked as not-invited—namely, white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black students at the high school. Many cultural progressives supported the meeting, claiming that power issues in the broader culture and the long history of oppression of African Americans justified creating this protected space. There is a para…

Dirty Money in the Appalachian Church: Six Years After Deadly Coal Mine Disaster, Where Are We Now?

By Michael J. Iafrate

…school, complete with brand new sports equipment, and full scholarships for 12 students for their six-year education. And while Fr. Harry Dunn, former pastor of Sacred Heart, told me that the gifts were made with no strings attached—and that he had personally told Blankenship neither he nor Massey Energy should expect the church’s endorsement or blessing—the coal baron did, on at least one occasion, speak to students at the school about the coal i…

Are Muslims Nuts?

By Haroon Moghul

…the West, such as Libya and Tunisia in some respects, and others that are Western institutionally (Turkey in NATO) or simply altogether and undeniably Western (Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo). These should be the basis of future relationships. We’re willing to pour billions of dollars into the machinery of conflict, but don’t want to sustain exchange programs, educational cooperation, or international visitors programs at nearly the same pace. We have t…

The Folly of Arab-West (Elite-Elite) Dialogue

By H.A. Hellyer

…League hosted a high-level international conference aimed at improving Arab-West relations. It was symbolically important for many reasons, not least because the Arab League actually borders Tahrir Square. Yet meetings like these face two big problems: The first is that we have to properly re-orientate how we define this ‘Arab-West’ relationship—both within the West and within the Arab world. The cultural construct is this: ‘the West’ historically…

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…ack where we belong: in the season of spending. While not reviving the post-September 11 rhetoric of shopping as an act of nationalism, we are once again being encouraged to spend—and told that spending is good for us. While disagreeing with this particular logic, I do agree that shopping is an ethical act. Today we live in a culture of cheap. We have an unprecedented access to cheap goods, yet we must recognize that cheap goods are cheaply made….

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…even to the point of fallacy. At one point Langdon is rescued by an African-American man who is a thirty-third degree Mason of the Scottish Rite and a lodge brother of Peter Solomon, which is highly unlikely. American Freemasonry, including the Scottish Rite, has always been unofficially segregated. In the 1780s, Prince Hall, a black Bostonian, was initiated by some Irish soldiers. The white lodges in Boston refused to accept him, so he formed his…

Hajj Journal: The Journey Begins and Ends

By Amina Wadud

…Think about this—after all the excitement to get started with this once-in-a-lifetime journey, to stop again in the U.S. is the worst kind of interim re-routing. I mean, am I on my way? Are we there yet? But the Charles de Gaulle airport, which is the transit spot to Jeddah—now that is really something. First of all, there will be other pilgrims there and the ihram has to be taken up, either here at the airport or on the plane itself. When we lea…

As Tensions Escalate in the Balkans, the West Could Hand Putin a Valuable Weapon

By Katherine Kelaidis

…on-alignment. It’s not support for Russia or Putin which motivates the anti-Western attitude among young Serbs today, but rather a feeling that Serbia was wronged by the West during the Yugoslav War and Kosovo Wars in the 1990s—a wrong that many see as emerging from the West’s willful misunderstanding of the region’s history. So, here is a 1-paragraph summary of a history that you probably didn’t hear in high school, but now need to learn ASAP: Du…