Religion Dispatches
…is at stake; when they ruminate over whether they should label themselves spiritual, or religious, or both, or neither; when they encounter any number of mundane moments when questions of religion press upon them. But what if our choices vis-à-vis religion have some other complicated and fraught economy beyond that of the psychic? Might such choices never be choices to begin with, despite the fact that the a priori status of that choice has gaine…
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…taught 1 Corinthians 6:19, in which the Apostle Paul allegedly argued that spiritual slavery is good because “You are not your own.” Evangelicals take this literally, believing that people are slaves to God and thus “our bodies do not belong to us.” Media studies professor Christopher R. Smit highlights how, “God’s proprietorship would have been theologically paramount in the young girl’s imagination… Always she was someone else’s, rarely her own…
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…missionaries, to as many as 3,000 students a year. This semester, more than 800 students are registered in Professor Bott’s classes. (Eleven are registered for BYU’s African-American history course this semester.) Professors at BYU routinely find themselves having to address racist and sexist content taught in Bott’s classes, and many are outraged and embarrassed by his rogue remarks to the Washington Post, say sources at the university. “Dr. Bott…
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…nt to get to some core non-physical identity, some materially transcendent spirit, some individuality that is more about the myth of modern individualism than about anything religious. Therein they miss the (religious) point. And this is where I will go on record to suggest that Darren Aronofsky is one of the greatest living religious filmmakers. I confess, I’ve been a fan since his first feature length film, π (alternatively titled: Pi: Faith in…
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…ng on your perspective and imagination: a tale of American colonization, a cheap rip-off of Pocahantas or Russian science fiction, an allegory for the Chinese industrialization process. Writing in the New York Times last week, Dave Itzkoff outlined the many ways in which James Cameron’s Avatar has been praised and/or condemned, the ways viewers have interpreted the movie as an allegory for this or that, the way it might even serve as a “Rorschach…
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…the birds and the workers) are not the expressed concerns of a purportedly spiritual corporation. Even if one can justify low paid but spiritually sound employment as a fast food clerk, it is disconcerting that companies like Hobby Lobby are not called upon to explain their reliance on cheap goods and labor. Exploitative working conditions, even if ones tucked out of sight in overseas factories, can’t be justified by religious rhetoric. Bethany Mo…
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…st Christian thinkers as a distraction from the more important life of the spirit. Saints no less than Augustine and Aquinas were clear that sex existed for procreation, with companionship (begrudgingly) as a secondary purpose. Following Jesus’ own path of virginity, however, was seen as the best life of all. Even when Protestant reformers emptied monasteries and convents, what they celebrated about marriage were friendship, parenthood, and sexual…
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…threatening. He captured, in other words, the birth of the neoconservative spirit. Something similar seems to be happening today among urbane, bourgeois, conservative intellectuals. For years, they’ve lionized (and patronized) Christian fundamentalists and various southern populists with something of the same credulity that an earlier generation of liberals brought to their dealings with the far left. Conservative elites thumbed their noses at the…
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…piety of life, with the practice of all moral duties. Not until definition number four in that dictionary do we find that religion might, beyond Christians, include “pagans and Mohammedans.” Of course, that definition ends with, “We speak of false religion as well as true religion” (emphasis his). It should come as no surprise that Webster’s 1828 version is the dictionary of choice for home-schoolers across the United States. The outlook on langua…
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…nce of these demographics on the state electorate in relation to the small number of African Americans, it is inconceivable to argue that African Americans are to blame. The fault lines of a progressive coalition to resist Prop. 8 were seemingly regional and religious as opposed to racially determined. Do Black Folks Need an Elton John? Scapegoating black folks is descriptively flawed because it pits a racial group against a multiracial reality. B…
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