Religion Dispatches
…ualization. But SoulCycle is also part of a larger gamble: namely, that Americans will be willing to meld the forms of spirituality and the forms of capitalism in more and more blatant ways. In this, SoulCycle has a lot in common with prosperity gospel preachers, ethical consumption marketers, and other moneymakers testing the frontiers of luxury and soulfulness. Let’s not be naïve: spirituality has been profitable for a very, very long time. In o…
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…er, the author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America, not only provides sharp analysis, but also unequivocally states that theocracy in America is possible and refreshingly rejects the narrative put forth by the vast majority of the documentary’s Christian interviewees. “One of the biggest fallacies about religion and especially Christianity in particular is that somehow it’s going to make you meek, and docile, and under…
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…ons that target loving parents of trans children, thereby raising a metaphorical middle finger to both fundamental human decency and the medical consensus. Both the rhetorical and legal attacks on trans people are, after all, of a piece. Dehumanization of the members of a vulnerable group scapegoated by grievance-driven authoritarians is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for genocide. And what’s happening in Texas now, with some state…
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…, ’80s and ’90s to reduce state support for higher education and induce Americans to take out loans so that they might have ‘skin in the game.’ This was part of a larger agenda to degrade the social infrastructure of public life, as policymakers traded easy credit and access to cheap consumer goods for high wages and a measure of economic security. It is no coincidence that all of this took shape in the wake of the civil rights movement, the fract…
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…nging rainbow flags to promote Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) is a cheap tactic if LGBTQ employees are treated poorly when it comes to pay, benefits, leave, promotion, and job security. Divide-and-rule is not a new tactic, for it’s well known in the Indian subcontinent that the British pitted one local Raja against the other based on tribe, religion, or caste—among other factors. The same applies to corporations as they stoke divisiveness…
Read More…ernaturalist”— as though its message of redemption and liberation of the African-American community has nothing to do with it. And then there’s the bit about “religious liberalism’s urge to follow secular liberalism in embracing the sexual revolution and all its works.” Cute. I wonder if a Times columnist might not want to consider the use of statistics in his work, like this one: 99% of all American women who have had sex have used some form of b…
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…ividual. Biden went on to hit many notes that are alienating to secular Americans and much of the Democratic base, sacralizing American political life and calling for “unity” and “comity” with those who want to deprive the marginalized of their rights. Gushing over the NPB itself, Biden stated that he was “honored to continue the tradition started by President Eisenhower.” From there, he launched into what amounts to a Christian sermon peppered wi…
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…etocentric worldview of monks. By restricting the monastic population to a number just large enough to run monasteries and to provide “costumed natives” for the tourist industry, Chinese government policymakers are privileging values like political stability, the physical preservation of monastic institutions as historical/cultural “relics,” and the tangible economic gains derived from treating these institutions as tourist venues. When they objec…
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…Jesus isn’t messiah material for religious Jews. So, at first glance, that number seems staggeringly high. A full third? Once you delve into the numbers, though, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quick…
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…tails ties to the Reichsbürger milieu. Experts attribute the stark rise in numbers to a heightened awareness and the agencies’ attempts to reduce the number of unreported cases. The conservative Minister of the interior of the previous Merkel administration, Horst Seehofer, had always refused to conduct a study of right-wing sentiments in the police and military, in spite of the warnings of social scientists who urged him to commission one. For ye…
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