Religion Dispatches
…slims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us out to be (our earliest heroes include Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Malcolm X), but we’ve had real problems with narrow-mindedness, institutional immaturity, misogyny, and religious illiteracy—these persist in places, but I think not like they did before. And that’s because American Muslims were able to separate Islam from its prac…
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…vailable to commodification.” The melding of Eastern spirituality and American capitalism isn’t new. As the popularity of yoga demonstrates, adapted ritual practices can sell. (Much the same could be said, too, about many martial arts). Spiritual practices can also be harnessed for corporate ends. “American capitalism has had a long and durable romance with Eastern spirituality,” Michelle Goldberg wrote last year on newyorker.com. “For well over a…
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…black theologians, including Cone, actually tend to reject Marxism as a philosophical source. It is too white, too Western and, tends to include only economic class, not race, in its power analysis. Cone’s theological sources are the bible and black experience. If one is going to argue against his theology, one must argue against these sources not Marx. So far, Beck has said nothing about black experience and nearly everything he has claimed about…
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…ok pictures with her phone as we attempted the warrior pose. Was I back in Los Angeles? Why wasn’t this different? The staff—all devotees of the Ananda movement, a Hindu spiritual fellowship founded in northern California during the late 60s—only reinforced feelings of familiarity. There was Jemal, the dreadlocked, Yale-educated monk who waxed philosophic about the “sublime” benefits of a celibate lifestyle. There was Shivani, a Jewish girl from O…
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…n be. Honest, exuberant, and fair-minded, Bailey is contrasted to the maniacal capitalist Mr. Potter, a big banker with whom he’s in direct competition. Clarence only makes his appearance in the final portion of the film as George contemplates suicide on a Christmas Eve, showing the despondent banker a version of reality had he never lived. Far from syrupy, even if “every time a bell rings an angel gets its wings,” It’s a Wonderful Life combines p…
Read More…mes published a front-page story reporting that Archbishop Roger Mahony of Los Angeles sat on reports of felony-level sexual abuse of children by priests for almost 15 years before he took action, and that the Los Angeles Catholic diocese waited at least 14 years before reporting abuse to law enforcement. The LA Times report was based on letters written by Mahony in 1986 and 1987 recently entered as evidence in a civil suit. More documents will be…
Read More…ous lack of cars, one of the most striking things about Theodore Twombly’s Los Angeles of the near future is its absence of sacred space. Anyone who has spent much time in Los Angeles knows that it’s hard to go a block without seeing a Catholic church, synagogue, Protestant chapel (be it Korean, African-American, or conservative Iowan), storefront iglesia, Mormon ward, ashram, or some building owned by the Scientologists. The City of Angels was al…
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…here, not all judges have ruled in the victims’ favor. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles finally released the 12,000 documents it agreed to make public as part of a 2007 sex-abuse settlement in which the archdiocese and its insurers paid a total of $660 million to over 500 victims. Ray Boucher was the lead plaintiff’s attorney in the civil suit against the L.A. Archdiocese. He says the nearly six-year battle to make the files public was difficult fo…
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…in his long and arduous path to Christianity. As I searched for a theological category to come to terms with our context, the word concupiscence leapt out at me. A theme that emerges in Augustine’s corpus is how we have misguided desire, or lust and passion, in relation to the material world and other human beings. How does Augustine define lust and passion? He often describes it as concupiscence: strong desire, especially sexual, that sometimes…
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…should be. This, it would seem, is the site of a deep division within American evangelicalism. There’s a serious difference of opinion over what values should be paramount in making movies. Left Behind could have been the vehicle for showing how this problem could be solved, but it didn’t work. The fight that Lalonde had with authors of the book and that Lalonde had with fans of the movies who were anxious about the remake will continue. And it do…
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