Religion Dispatches
…pace right there between Washington and Lincoln with the Reflecting Pool—a spiritual space in our nation—the Spirit of the Lord is going to be unleashed like I think you’ve never felt it before. In the world of Mormonism, we call this rhetorical move “bearing one’s testimony.” When one bears testimony, one attests to the truth of a spiritual principle. The phrase “the Spirit is so strong” is a conventional Mormon phrase to describe one’s perceptio…
Read More…phrase: ‘the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.‘ But the liberating Spirit is not simply… the exegete’s own vision. The Spirit is Christ … Who shows us the way. With the word of Spirit and of freedom, a further horizon opens up, but at the same time a clear limit is placed upon arbitrariness and subjectivity, which unequivocally binds both the individual and the community and brings about a new, higher obligation than that of the letter: na…
Read More
…hat coincidentally matches Paul, Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (also published in 1905) describes how for “Those people in possession of spontaneous, fun-living dispositions” the creed of endless material accumulation coupled with a disdain of pleasure was “absolutely meaningless.” Pittsburgh’s central creed was exactly as Weber described it, a cold city governed by a tough gospel, and so Paul absconds with his fat…
Read More
…tant Reformation and its vernacular translation of the scriptures is a new spirit unleashed by both. The spirit of these two movements—Reformation and translation—was radically egalitarian and individualistic. The contention was that all people were capable of close reading, and the commitment was to individual Christians’ rights to make up their own minds about what the scripture said. These political commitments hinged in turn, on the recognitio…
Read More…angels” by distorting the words of Francis: Pope Francis said ‘do not seek spiritual answers in yoga classes’. Yoga is certainly a risk. There’s the spiritual health risk. When you take up those practices from other cultures, which are outside our Christian domain, you don’t know what you are opening yourself up to. The bad spirit can be communicated in a variety of ways. I’m not saying everyone gets it, or that it happens every time, and people m…
Read More…come in His name to intercede for that very gift of life. Father, the same spirit of Herod who 2000 years ago attempted to exterminate the life of the Messiah today lives even America. The legislation that incorporates death and infanticide all under the capopy of reform. Today we ask for your spirit to convict the Senate and Congress, mobilize and activate the church to stand for righteousness and justice. We, black and white, brown and yellow, r…
Read More
…uture where businesses benevolently guide us toward peace, prosperity, and spiritual vitality; managers become therapeutic purveyors of spiritual wisdom and for-profit firms act as the ultimate arbiters of the social order. Still, when the former COO of Wal-Mart, Don Soderquist, states in his keynote address at the Conference, “Wal-Mart believes that it has a responsibility to God to take care of the planet,” behind this view lies a commitment to…
Read More
…urches in the United States—so Rodriguez is claiming to represent more than 10% of those, even though he represents a demographic that constitutes just 13% of the Latino population. In a recent interview with the Arizona Star, Rodriguez claimed to represent 40,118 affiliated churches nationwide—nearly 6,000 more churches than his website claims. While it’s true that Latino evangelicals tend to trend Republican more than Latino Catholics do, they s…
Read More
…is we, after all, who extended promises of trust-building guidelines and a spirit of inclusion to cautious voices on all sides, asking them to take the risks necessary to talk and to listen. When we don’t live up to that same spirit, all we manage to do is affirm every cynical instinct, every pessimistic expectation that is so pervasive in the politics of abortion and that keeps us from achieving anything together. And our responsibility to uphold…
Read More
…owledge the deep mystery at the heart of the human being in which body and spirit are intertwined. This is not quite the same as the celebrated “mind-body problem,” although that interface is another great mystery. The spirit-body connection is one that almost everyone acknowledges to be real but that almost no one can pin down. Attending family members and friends and nurses can often pinpoint, for example, the moment at which the dying person le…
Read More