Religion Dispatches
…ies of self-congratulation and spiritual uplift among the rich. But middle-class congregations were the norm, and middle-class congregations are having a horrendous time coming to terms with the new reality of congregants who can no longer support the institution financially and who may even start disappearing—literally—because of the intense status-loss shame they have experienced. Please say that you heard it here first: those congregations that…
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…, “children under 18” and individuals who are (or whose parents have been) classified as having politically problematic views are prohibited from entering the monastic life. —Party officials ultimately decide who will or will not be granted “official status” as monk or nun. Large monasteries in the TAR often have an “unofficial” monastic population that can be up to half of the official number of resident monks—a kind of waiting list. Although res…
Read More…whatever religious views she wants, but when she shares those views to her classroom in her capacity as a public school teacher her speech becomes government speech. Her views about what makes a “real” Christian are a confessional position and when she used her position as a government employee to impose those views on others, it undermined the establishment clause. That’s the real issue. The fact that she also offended students and parents is imp…
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…nservatism that has stoked anger and despair among the left-behind working class. As the Dalai Lama and Arthur Brooks wrote recently, the answer to the despair sweeping through increasingly superfluous working-class communities is both spiritual and temporal. What’s needed, they say, is a concerted effort to “create a wealth of opportunities for meaningful work, so that everyone who is capable of contributing can do so.” Telling people “you should…
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…ushed through the NAFTA and WTO agreements even though millions of working-class Democrats and thousands of US manufacturing centers were cruelly slaughtered along the way. That carnage is by now very well documented. With a handful of exceptions, neither Mexican workers nor US workers received any benefits at all from the NAFTA, whereas a very significant part of our current immigration problem stems from its devastating and crippling effects ins…
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…They came from the gut-wrenching experiences of the Southern rural working class, people who were poor recruits for the modernist fundamentalism of conservative townspeople, and difficult material to mold into an organized movement. [Note: John Hayes’ dissertation “Hard, Hard Religion: Faith and Class in the New South” (University of Georgia, 2007) plumbs their experience as well as anyone ever has.] Once, after hearing a moving address at an acad…
Read More…isty skit (a hijabi confessing she likes to curse “a lot”), but no working-class, no poor people, no African Americans, and in the end, everything would be molded to “fit” a white middle class A-plus student stereotype. So next time the audience is half my age, I’ll think twice about giving them my last free evening. It’s good we are standing up for ourselves. I guess poor and working-class young Muslim women will eventually make their stand or th…
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…nstitutions and spiritual movements need money. I’ve paid for High Holiday tickets, passed the plate at church, and dropped bills into the basket at yoga class. But Osho’s opacity and its denial of the obvious (robes and shampoos, wine and brownies, books and videos were all moneymakers) bothered me. My fuming was worthless. Orientation still started 45 minutes late. My students and I, packed into a classroom with 20 other guests, were led through…
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When I first heard the tragic news of the shootings at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, I was preparing a lecture for my Introduction to Western Religions course on Jesus in the Qur’an. This lecture asks a deceptively simple question: How was Islam different from Christianity in the 7th century? As a historian of religion, I like to use questions like this to challenge my students to interrogate the definitions of religion that we use and ho…
Read More…sion talking about the LGBT people being less than human. For example, the number two person in the state broadcasting company – actually now he’s the number one person – hosted a show devoted to the question of whether it was enough to protect our children to ban homosexual propaganda or whether more needed to be done. He argued that more needed to be done. He said and we need to outlaw blood and sperm donations by them. And if they die in car ac…
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