Religion Dispatches
…ort and through security, I was too tired for breakfast. I slept the whole flight from RDU to Charlotte, but once I’d landed in Charlotte, with only twenty minutes to transfer to my Milwaukee flight, I was starving. Famished. Broken. But the only breakfast option I trusted was Starbucks, and every single Starbucks had a line that resembled a breakdown of civilization at the baggage claim. So I did not do that. I stopped at a newsstand slash conve…
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…erson at the desk, who sat there, right when the doors were closed and the flight took off, just as you arrived. It doesn’t really matter who exactly provides some justice. The institution probably just prefers to funnel it through one channel, namely customer service, because then they can have stricter rules, what is given, how much is given, under what circumstances, and so on. There are larger social problems than missed flights, like racist p…
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…om Calvinism and introduced dominion theology to the Christian Right in the 1980s and 1990s. Wagner and his close associates both introduced novel beliefs and practices, and revised others—steps which remain controversial and consequential to this day, such as the notion of “strategic level spiritual warfare” (see Glossary). For Wagner all of these 20th century movements are to be understood as “components of the NAR,” as he wrote in a 2012 anthol…
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…olarship: the career of the Afro-Creole Spiritualist Cercle Harmonique from 1858 to 1877. Religious studies scholar Clark has thoroughly mined the records of the Cercle, kept at the University of New Orleans, and produced one of the most important recent works I have seen in race and religion in American history. By focusing on Afro-Creole Spiritualism in New Orleans, we get an extended, as well as intimate, look at how one very particular group,…
Read More…A 17-year-old student shot a boy in the Manual Training High School. • May 1, 1958, Massapequa, New York. A 15-year-old high school freshman was shot and killed by a classmate in a washroom of the Massapequa High School. • September 24, 1959, New York City, New York. Twenty-seven men and boys and an arsenal were seized in the Bronx last night as the police headed off a gang war resulting from the fatal shooting of a teenager Monday at Morris High…
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…those victims who did report their victimization to Episcopal leaders, the number one assessment from both trans/non-binary and cisgender respondents was that “little or no change” came about as a result. 20.6% of transgender and non-binary survivors reported that they simply left the church altogether. By comparison, “only” 10.7% of cisgender women felt they had to leave. (Curiously, there’s no data on this front for LGB-identified Episcopalians….
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…a punishing profile of Marc Gafni, an ex-rabbi who reinvented himself as a New Age spiritual leader. A founder of the Center for Integral Wisdom and organizer of the Success 3.0 Summit, Gafni has built a New Age brand around two trademark concepts—Unique Self and Outrageous Love—which, like much of “Integral Theory,” seems to draw from psychotherapy, Eastern and Western religious traditions, and philosophy. Or as his website’s biography puts it, “…
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…lingworth, “Cha…cha…cha…changes: A journey with Aladdin,” Melody Maker, May 12, 1973 Crowd: Will you touch, will you mend me Christ? Won’t you touch, will you heal me Christ? Will you kiss, you can cure me Christ? Won’t you kiss, won’t you pay me Christ? Jesus: Oh, there’s too many of you, don’t push me Oh, there’s too little of me, don’t crowd me Heal yourselves! —“The Temple,” Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) • On July 3rd, 1973, Bowie ceremonially…
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…the most liberal and most conservative margins, refused to sign up for the new configuration in 1957. The more liturgical “German” Reformed wing (the old Evangelical and Reformed Church) mistrusted the Yankees and vice versa. Today’s UCC, at 1.3 million members, is small and getting smaller. The UCC can and should take pride in adopting a national stance for marriage equality and total LGBT inclusion in church and public life. But it doesn’t much…
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…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…
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