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

By Matt Hamilton

…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…

A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…individuals and families spiraling into debt is now being celebrated once again. While last year was the year of reserve and frugality, we are now back 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 ethica…

Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

By Daniel Silliman

…Chronicles of Narnia brought a big profit for Walt Disney and Walden Media—around $750 million globally. After a few films, the franchise stalled, though. Rising production costs, declining ticket sales and increasingly mixed reviews led to conflict between the various production companies. There’s currently a legal moratorium preventing a fourth installment. Other major studio efforts haven’t cracked the code for commercial success either: Darren…

The Faith that Faith Produced

By Haroon Moghul

…lation would leave me be. And so I did it. I did what even the pagan Arabs around Muhammad, (peace be upon him), refused to do: I rejected God altogether. And on ceasing to be a Muslim, it occurred to me that perhaps this was not only a good thing, but also a reasonable thing. If with sudsy hands and slippery dishes I could just let God go, then it seemed—almost inevitably—that I’d never really believed in Him, anyway. So what happened after I ren…

Corporations Have Consciences and Contraceptives Are Cheap: Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court

By Sarah Posner

…riking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fired the most challenging questions at the companies’ lawyer, Paul Clement, confronting the essential underpinnings of his clients’ claims. In particular, they questioned whether RFRA was intended to cover corporations, whether a party can claim a religious exemption if granting it impacts the rights of others (in this case, the companies’ em…

RD News Round-Up—September 22, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…use of torture. While the Washington gathering saluted the nomination of Sarah Palin, extolled the virtues of opposing abortion, same-sex marriage and embryonic stem-cell research, David Gushee, a Mercer University professor and Baptist preacher, was helping lead a discussion amongst some 200 U.S. religious, legal and political leaders about the use of torture in the war on terrorism at a conference called A National Summit on Torture: Religious…

News Round-Up: State of the Christian Movie

By Gwynne Watkins

…Dead is competing with the Hollywood blockbuster Noah, while the Biblical adaptation Son of God is still hanging in there. Here’s a round-up of news and views on this new Christian film boom. Noah had a bang-up opening weekend, but do audiences actually like it? Exit polls suggest that the film didn’t go over well, perhaps because, as Kyle Buchanan at Vulture argues, Noah himself is a colossal jerk. Despite the controversy over Darren Aronofsky’s…

RD News Round-Up—September 29, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…d Parenthood special is that for the first time, the major pro-life groups around the country are coming together to implement a unified national action,” said Eric Scheidler, communications director for the Chicago-based Pro-Life Action League, the group spearheading the coalition. Coalition members pledged to take the following steps to counter Planned Parenthood’s nationwide expansion effort: Mobilize pro-life supporters at the grassroots level…

What Does a Moral Economy Look Like for the 99 Percent?

By Jonathan Rosenblum

…-Tac is that the elements of this new social movement union are everywhere around us, embedded in the daily struggles of working people. Our job, as people concerned about social justice, is to learn from these struggles, replicate the successes, and combine them in ever more ambitious efforts as we build a labor movement of the 99 percent. By nature, these efforts will claim new strategies and disrupt norms and conventions, making it uncomfortabl…

Mormon Women Knock at the Door, Are Turned Away

By Holly Welker

…the group earlier this year after her work with women fighting for justice around the world forced her to ask, “What is it I do to assert my self-respect in my own most intimate community?” The group went public on March 17, 2013, the anniversary of the founding of the Relief Society, with a website featuring profiles of Latter-day Saints who support female ordination. Those profiles allow women to “use our own identities as a tool is a way to as…