Religion Dispatches
…on has been described as a church, a cult, and, more cholerically, as “the most mindless version of being ‘spiritual but not religious.’” And second, SoulCycle has made money. A lot of money. This tends to happen when you charge people more than $30 for a single spin class, and still manage to sell out 60-person sessions. The spiritual and the financial can coexist, of course, and SoulCycle will be testing its model even more in the coming months….
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…vements in Central, Western, and Southern Sudan, where the populations are mostly black African. A major cause of the war was the application of shari’ah law in 1983, which incited rebellion from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), a secular, though largely Christian group now ready to declare independence for Southern Sudan. But the Khartoum government and the SPLM have not agreed on how they will share Sudan’s oil reserves, and ethnic…
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…denounce the normal reproductive and affective activity of healthy adults—most of them married at religious altars—in prime childbearing years. While heaping onerous penalties on workers, we, the complicit beneficiaries of a decades-old system, get off scot free—much like the absent male partner of the adulterous woman dragged before Jesus for punishment. While declaring the immigration reform of 1986 a failure, we posthumously praise the benefic…
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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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…In the course of this struggle, odd alliances have been forged; one of the most unlikely being the one between the Haredim, or Ultra Orthodox, and the Settler movement. To understand what makes this alliance so unexpected, and what the important implications are, a little background: The original Zionist ideology that founded the country was largely socialist, secular, and agrarian. The dominance of that Zionism is no more, having been supplanted,…
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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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…arian Christians believe. A third difference has to do with human agency. Most environmental prophets think it’s still possible—barely—that humans might just rise to the occasion and significantly change their destructive behavior. Most religious doomsayers do not seriously believe that any radical repentance will occur; and they rather hope that it won’t, because they so relish the thought of the wicked being consumed as the cups of divine wrath…
Read More…hics. You are not likely to be on Twitter if you earn under $2 per day, as most people in Egypt do. Despite what we’re seeing in Tahrir Square, the Facebook Generation (including the April 6 Youth Movement) as a serious force for political organization is a dubious notion. The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, while not being the poster-child of the Facebook Generation, almo*]}*st certainly does have a wide following in the slums of Cairo. The…
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…ederal constitutional amendment to ban all abortions in all states under almo*]}*st all circumstances. We don’t mean it. We don’t act on it. Yet we keep saying it.” The election of Michael Steele as chairman of the Republican National Committee marks a concrete attempt to put some distance between the GOP and the religious right. Many religious conservatives opposed his candidacy, largely because of his association with the centrist Republican Leaders…
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…esponse 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 resp…
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