Religion Dispatches
…ath and resurrection of Jesus, the Christ, and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It means that LGBT Christians have the same place at Christ’s table as anyone else. The chorus of the praise song, “We Are One in the Spirit,” echoes Paul (Galatians 5:22) when it repeats the refrain, “And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love, Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” It is in this Spirit that we can “out-evangelize the ev…
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…in your mind: the film has inspired you to believe that somewhere in your spirit you, like the Na’vi, have a “port” that is intended to connect with nature, but as you frantically search your surrounding environment, you simply don’t know where to plug this port in. You long to commune with a holy, green, transpersonal home, but you realize that you are destroying the closest thing you’ve got to that. It’s time to get back to the garden, your spi…
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…sbyterians, and Methodists. . . . Nonsense. I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.” There are those who would disagree with Robertson’s picks for the embodying the spirit of the Antichrist. Fellow televangelist Robert Tilton declared Ole Anthony, founder of Trinity Foundation, to be the Antichrist. Then you have the Sex Pistols, who state that they are an Antichrist, as does “Antichrist Superstar” Marilyn Manson and lots of other…
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…
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…at a crossroads in history—we can choose to move forward into new emerging spiritualities, or we can heed the siren sound of the traditionalists calling us back to a romanticized, rigid, past. We are not passive observers, Bass writes, but active participants in shaping what’s to come. Bass herself has been at the forefront of the emergent spirituality movement, with books like Christianity for the Rest of Us (2007) and A People’s History of Chris…
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…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…
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…se gender is also supposed to be “eternal” and a feature of our pre-mortal spirit. Presumably we don’t have spiritual chromosomes—so how can a spirit be biological? Of course, they had to make this clarification because, prior to making it, the Proclamation was clearly consistent with the common transgender narrative that there is a gender mismatch between one’s soul/spirit and one’s body. In fact, the Proclamation seems to beg for the possibility…
Read More…is ever enough.” In other words, the Church was a victim of the hedonistic spirit of the 1960s. Benedict makes this rather surprising conclusion most explicit. In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children… It was maintained—even within the realm of Catholic theology—that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a “better than” and a “worse than”. Nothing i…
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…carry a single one of his titles, this Nobel Prize winner (for literature, 1921) is among the world’s greatest satirists. He is also the writer of a clever piece of speculative fiction, Revolt of the Angels (1914), that comes across a bit like Pullman—drunk on sacramental wine. Satan as Patron Saint of Art Anatole France extends the 19th-century Romantic view that we owe the very things that make life interesting—from sensual pleasures, to love o…
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…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…
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