Religion Dispatches
…New Life Church’s World Prayer Center once… …I would like to do that. It’s cheap and they have hotel rooms—prayer closets, they call them. Or take the Crystal Cathedral. Right. Philip Johnson, who was a leading postmodern architect, designed the Crystal Cathedral. So what’s going on? As these systems become more complex, they become more volatile. As they become more volatile, you have to figure out how, in the economic realm, to manage risk. You…
Read More…hese are big words — hope, forgiveness and peace. They rarely have the megaphone that the party of “nope” enjoys. Nevertheless, they are words that religious people need to protect with all our hearts and souls. We too need a department of homeland security and its job is to protect our words. Let’s start with hope. When a tragedy happens, it often steals our hope. The 9-11 bombing is a terrible tragedy. It is a tragedy with causes in a larger hum…
Read More…on-Muslims to support those ideals while transcending easy stereotypes and cheap fear-mongering. We should therefore pause in our reactions and ask ourselves; perhaps an Islamic revolution in Egypt is not de facto a bad thing. Finally, I’m reminded of Karen Armstrong’s description of the historical mission Muslims are tasked with: “In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical missio…
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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…
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…There, she found Ted at the nadir of his professional life, moving between cheap motels with his wife Gayle and two of their five children as he went door-to-door, selling life insurance to strangers. From the pinnacle of evangelical leadership to this? Pelosi later told an interviewer that the story of Haggard’s exile was too compelling in its complexity to pass up. How the mighty had fallen! She brought along her camera, and the Trials of Ted Ha…
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…ronofsky’s tale is disinvested of tacky teardrops falling from the sky and cheap-trick resurrections. The reason reviewers passed over the religious is not simply, I suspect, because of religious illiteracy, but because of the received wisdom of late-modern culture that continues to dwell on a body-soul dualism, with the soul in power, the body a mere marionette. Several of the religious review sites described Randy’s body in metaphorical terms: R…
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…is unethical, I wonder how he imagines those clothes in China are made so cheaply, and whether an industrial factory qualifies as a gauntlet. If Rhinehart washed his clothes himself, however, he would need a washing machine, which takes energy, and he couldn’t say he lived on a battery anymore. A commenter on Rhinehart’s post aptly called this brand of asceticism “consumption laundering”; because Rinehart doesn’t do the consumption himself, it do…
Read More…rd is a real American, because Bill Gates is American. Those of you using iPhones, by the way, are probably Iranians and should be detained or deported. Because Steve Jobs was part Syrian, and Syria is part Iranian, which means your iPhone auto-correct is lying to you. Come to think of it, how do we know Lindsey Graham is not lying to us? How do we know Lindsey Graham’s not an Iranian? What if he’s the Manchurian—or should I say Mazandaranian!—can…
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…an’t quite pinpoint what all of these had in common, except that they were cheap, over-simplified, and kitschy. And thanks to Walter Benjamin, Clement Greenberg, the Frankfurt School, and a legion of writers and musicians allergic to the cliché, I came to reject kitsch and its quasi-fascistic associations. Feel this way, think this way, act this way—no! It took another several years before I really understood that some people, perhaps most people,…
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…ng on your perspective and imagination: a tale of American colonization, a cheap rip-off of Pocahantas or Russian science fiction, an allegory for the Chinese industrialization process. Writing in the New York Times last week, Dave Itzkoff outlined the many ways in which James Cameron’s Avatar has been praised and/or condemned, the ways viewers have interpreted the movie as an allegory for this or that, the way it might even serve as a “Rorschach…
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