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

…r gigs. Rinzler and Burrow’s new meditation studio, MNDFL, is just a block away from Washington Square Park, in one of New York City’s most chic areas. For the price of two entrees at Denny’s (plus a dessert), you can drop in for a 45-minute session that includes a brief introduction, a guided meditation, and a debrief Q&A with one of MNDFL’s 27 teachers. Special deals are available for your first month of visits. “In this branded form, it offers…

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Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

…chedule interviews. I don’t know how not to do this. Yet here I was at the Ananda Ashram in rural India, expecting (and craving) swift condemnation by the monks and nuns at the sight of an iPhone. I was on a university-sponsored trip to the subcontinent with other journalists, all of us covering politics and religion. The reporting would come later, however. First came three days in an ashram, and I hoped for a 72-hour hiatus from the compulsion t…

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Religious Affiliation, ‘Mankind’: India’s Anti-Corruption Activist Leads Second Freedom Struggle

…er own country, and has lent her considerable status to the grassroots India Against Corruption campaign as the movement evolves. What some are calling India’s Arab Spring has been more like a summer of discontent, complete with demonstrations and arrests, all in support of this epic fight against government corruption—what Anna Hazare, whose hunger strike made headlines, has named “India’s second freedom struggle.” I was glad to have the chance t…

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Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

…!,” between a blurry “photo” and a pull quote informing readers that the “FAA launches top secret investigation into incident.” To those who dismiss any sort of faith in angels, they belong to a category that also includes ghosts and UFO abductions, clairvoyance and Sasquatch. There are reasons for such dismissals, of course. Many pop cultural representations of angels borrow extensively from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at re…

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I Miss Tina Fey

Last night I went to see Sarah Palin here in Jacksonville. Rather than repeat the details of the event I’ll just make these observations.  As I drove across the bridge there was (seriously, I’m not kidding) a huge dark cloud over downtown. The gritty details: This was a fundraiser for Heroic Media, a faith-based non-profit that publicizes alternatives to abortion. Originally planned for an auditorium that holds over 2000 people, it was moved to a…

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How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

…e loophole Sullivan gives himself on the matter of sexual freedom is the characteristic heresy of progressive Christians: “It is to progressive Christianity as the heresy of the prosperity gospel, or nationalism, is to conservative American Christianity.” Just two points about this. First, it has not been my experience that progressive Christians are blind to the problems of a hypersexualized culture or that they/we are saying libertinism is accep…

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Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate

…ired from Fuller and moved to Colorado Springs! I felt like I worked at a catalog call-in center. Seriously. I would never have expected to be talking about Wagner in conjunction with the 2012 election cycle, but here goes: C. Peter Wagner was the Donald McGavran Professor of Church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary when I was there as a student in the early 1990s. He had had a career on the mission field in South America before coming to Full…

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Episcopal Church Assault Data Reveals the Dark Side of Inclusive Christianity

…tside Episcopal churches—they experience them within Episcopal churches at alarmingly high rates, too. And the denomination’s structures (canon law included) have consistently failed to protect them. New data reveals the scope of the abuse crisis Buried deep in the Reports to the General Convention are the results of a survey, conducted in 2020, that quantifies the violence epidemic. Based on a similar survey conducted in 2017 amongst United Metho…

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Wojnarowicz’s Ant-Covered Jesus: Blasphemy or Religious Art?

…and around New York City, with significant travels throughout Latin America and Europe. Catholic schooling left him scarred, but it is simplistic to suggest he turned against religion. Instead, he sought a more primal, even childlike faith, in touch with the natural world and the bodies of other people. His work in photography, film, and video continually expressed this, even when it became the most confrontational. He was openly gay, and outspok…

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Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

…ompaniment, chanted on iPod, and piped from watches into earplugs—they are available in as many digital forms as there are devices to access them. Hopeful worshippers are even constructing their own online religious “texts” in the form of digitized prayers, video accompaniment to existing religious texts, and the recording and sharing of recitation of prayers and liturgy. But as religious texts go digital, they acquire new qualities. What are the…

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