Religion Dispatches
…dless of their…profession,” but I somehow doubt that sanitation workers outnumber investment bankers in SoulCycle studios (one of which is across the street from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Tribeca). Classes with popular instructors sell out in minutes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get priority booking. “Ultimately, this is what brand religion is all about: stoking emotion with a combination of scarcity and urgenc…
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…y Spirit. He remembers Pentecost, when, in the Christian Scripture, the first apostles received the guidance of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem. William, however, didn’t make it to Jerusalem or to a university. After he crossed from Egypt into Israel, border guards took him to immigration prison. Months later, he was handed over to an Israeli employment agency to be a source of cheap labor in Eilat—the bottom tip of the country, where the Negev meets…
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…nt immigration reform impasse caps a decade of argument over the vexing question of strangers in our midst. What to do with the 12 million estimated undocumented aliens laboring to keep us fed, clothed, and sheltered, their 3 million US-born children studying alongside our own, and the predatory elements (smugglers, agribusiness, hotel chains, restauranteurs, and consumers) that feed cheaply off their precarious status at the bottom of our economi…
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…n’t “earned.” My friend Bill McKibben nailed this a long time ago. He suggested that instead of calling it Christianity, it would be more accurate to label what we have here as “Franklinity,” after that epitome of thrift and industry, good old Philadelphia Ben. McKibben’s gibe shouldn’t distract us, however. This is the dominant form of (American) Christianity today—both the social group and the publication that oddly still serves as its handmaide…
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…untries, Israeli citizens, or inhabitants of the West Bank. Finally, and most interestingly, the Haredim, or Ultra Orthodox. This group, mostly descended from Eastern European Jews, were traditionally (and confusingly to outsiders) actually anti-Zionist and not engaged in Israeli politics at all. The Haredi accepted that it was Zionism that had allowed them to settle in the Holy Land, yet they maintained Israel had no theological status; and this…
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…rces that actually drive the mind.” Passages like this make me wish he’d just stuck to theory and stayed away from storytelling altogether. Ultimately, it seems that Brooks himself has not really been effectively jostled from the comfort of his own categories. It doesn’t take much to convince me of the importance of emotions, of reason’s deep dependence on the passions, desires, and feelings in our animal bodies. But this is something I’ve learned…
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…e are now entering an apocalyptic scenario without precedent in recorded history. My interest here is comparing and contrasting the End Times as envisioned by certain of the faithful and the End Times as conceived by, say, James Hansen—the NASA climate change prophet. I’m interested not only in what the doomsday prophets say but also in how we receive what they say—in the part of ourselves that actually thrills to it. But before parsing similariti…
Read More…pressors, by images from Afghanistan and Iraq, by constant betrayals, to mistrust the US and the West. These masses are now demanding and gaining the political space to express themselves. They will hardly speak kindly of US and Western policy of the past fifty years. Yet they have a choice before them. The choice is to either pursue their interests through rival realpolitik ideological positions or to pursue justice through the evolution of int…
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…e powerful the religious right becomes within it because it’s one of the last constituencies standing. The 2006 and 2008 elections each left the party more socially conservative than before, as moderates were defeated. The remaining voters seem to like it this way: According to a recent Rasmussen poll, a plurality of Republicans think their party has been too moderate during the Bush years, and fully 55% of them want their party to model itself mo…
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…n response to the many scandals associated with the National Prayer Breakfast—most notably the exploitation of the event by convicted Russian spy Maria Butina. The fallout from these scandals led the organizers to make some changes in how the event is run starting this year. Most substantively, the NPB itself is now run by a legally distinct entity from the Family, and only the president, senators, and members of Congress are invited, with their r…
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