Religion Dispatches
…a hard time with the example of Quesalid, a shamanic healer who sucks the “spirit” of the disease; anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss knows the “spirit” is fake, but the healing seems to work. Anyway, the unseen world is presumed to exist, just out of sight, and certain people have the power to make it seen. Spirits can be reached out to as a source of wisdom, maybe sort of like the Internet. And like the Internet, the unseen world doesn’t necessa…
Read More
…mating the difficulties but I really am calling for more trust in the Holy Spirit. Which to me doesn’t mean avoiding responsibility but instead means exercising great care about the change we need—balancing courage with humility, and boldness with gentleness—all fruits of the Spirit. Most essential is making sure we use just means toward just ends, not bullying or demonizing anyone. It should be possible, it must be possible, to employ non-hostile…
Read More
…modern sense. That is why certain later people are identified by this same Spirit to be the elected readers for their generation, offered a way to crack the hidden codes of divine scripture. In most cases, the very belief that a given reader of the Apocalypse had been divinely appointed carried with it the clear implication that those times must be very close. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need such a close and spiritually esoteric reading at all. If tha…
Read More
…, once observed that he could not find many fundamentalist sermons from the 1990s (he had been reviewing Southern Baptist sermons in particular) that actually drew upon the teachings and parables of Jesus. The proof texts and sermon texts these preachers used were nearly all rules and regulations laid down in Levitical holiness codes, in wrath-filled passages from the prophetic literature, and in the Pauline and pseudo-Pauline literature. This hea…
Read More…odriguez believes evangelicals need to “repudiate the spirit of Herod, the spirit of Sodom and Gomorrah, the spirit of Jezebel.” Both believe taxpayer dollars can help support such beliefs — since, by signing the letter, they’ve indicated that an evangelical organization receiving federal faith-based grants could decline to hire someone who shared those views, or who might be one of those evil, wicked people. “Religious organizations desiring such…
Read More
…ly image and familiar spirit. The Elvis born poor in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1935 and who died rich in Graceland in 1977 fades from view with each passing year, each new generation. But that Elvis, the physical man with the guitar and lips, hip-shakes and sideburns, the one embalmed and displayed before crowds and crowds of people congregating around the corpse, is only half man now, less and less significant compared to the spiritual body that, un…
Read More…His central tenet of theo-politics: to “repudiate the spirit of Herod, the spirit of Sodom and Gomorrah, the spirit of Jezebel.” Rodriguez, like the Catholic bishops, opposes immigration reform with LGBT equality. But a bloc of House Democrats are opposed to letting that critical piece of justice fall away from comprehensive immigration reform. As Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), a supporter of immigration reform with LGBT equality, told me a few weeks ag…
Read More
…in queer people and relationships are analogous to the pouring out of the Spirit on the Gentiles? In Romans 11, Paul warns those who have been grafted in to God’s covenantal relationship with Israel not to be arrogant. Note the kindness and severity of God, he admonishes in verse 22. The kindness of God to us depends on our kindness to others. Otherwise, Paul tells us, we will be cut off. So what might this mean for how we are to understand Chris…
Read More…od was no longer hostile or indifferent; he was a ubiquitous, all-powerful Spirit or Mind, and since ‘man’ was really Spirit too, man was coterminous with God… The trick, for humans, was to access the boundless power of Spirit and thus exercise control over the physical world.” From there, Ehrenreich shows how positive thinking evolved into a creed of capitalist motivation, largely by way of Norman Vincent Peale. She writes of the truly terrifying…
Read More…bian people have gone through, I quoted a scripture in Zechariah [Zechariah 13:6] where someone—who Mormons interpret as Christ—comes and shows wounds, and he says, “I was wounded in the house of my friends.” I used that imagery to characterize the scars of gay and lesbian people. I know it’s strong imagery. I just feel really mournful about what they have been through. All of these realizations are very new to me, and it’s still quite raw. I was…
Read More