Religion Dispatches
…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…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…
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…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…
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…us Christ of Latter-day Saints. Confused about which church he should join, 14-year-old Joseph Smith read James 1:5: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.” Joseph therefore decided to ask God for wisdom. In response, God and Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph and told him to join no church, for they were all false. Instead, Joseph would be guided to restore God…
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…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…
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…s” is, at the very least, problematic. As I suggest in the book, mind-body-spirit spirituality is in danger of making us stupid, selfish, and unhappy. Stupid—because its open-ended, inclusive and non-judgemental attitude to truth-claims actually becomes an obstacle to the combative, argumentative process whereby we discern sense from nonsense. To treat all claims as equivalent, as valid perspectives on an unsayable ultimate reality, is not to real…
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…d inside the mosque one day, I came across Bab raqm tis’wa thamanin, “door number 89,” literally. The door with no name. Facing the mosque at door number one, bab maalik ’abd-al-’Aziz, this door is off to the left. Looking at the mosque floor plan, this is where the building structure of the mosque is deepest. This is “the women’s section.” I noticed as I was walking through the first floor toward door number one, the kings’ door, on my way out af…
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…to get more upset about these things until I realized a couple of things. Number one, not everyone’s going to like you. Number two, engaging with these people in arguments is often fruitless. Number three, a lot of times they refuse to listen. And number four, a very small percentage of them are actually crazy. There’s a great scene in a movie called The Trouble with Angels from the 1960s. It’s about a Catholic girls’ school outside of Philadelph…
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…black female bodies is having a heightened moment culturally? I’m seeing a number of images come out of the 1991 film Daughters of the Dust. We have to pull everything we’re seeing now, especially Lemonade, back to that filmmaker. Her name was Julie Dash. In some ways, Beyoncé has her finger on the pulse of cultural currency and recognizes that in order for her to stay current, she has to see what’s happening in various communities and integrate t…
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