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The Unbelieving Future of Christian Faith

By Peter Laarman

…oint, but defenders of the One True Faith will always retort that the Holy Spirit somehow enabled the theological victors to sweep all before them. What interests me more than the history is the huge anxiety still attaching to deviations from creed and convention. Not all faiths seem to share this intense anxiety, but for many Christians it has always seemed that without fixed doctrinal tenets, we will slip immediately into an anything-goes abyss….

Latest Diatribe on Francis and Latin Mass in the Times Launders the History — and Troubling Elements — of the ‘Tradition’

By Matthew Gabriele

…ut the biggest claim Dougherty makes in his piece, of course, is about the spirit of the ecumenical council—that it created a “new faith.” It’s an old song within the Church. If a constant refrain within Catholicism is ecclesia semper reformanda (“the church is always being reformed”), then there’s always someone else complaining that those reforms have perverted the “true” nature of Christianity. Dougherty makes it clear, and takes it further, wh…

When it Comes to Societal Dominion, the Details Matter: A Reporter’s Guide to the New Apostolic Reformation, Part II

By Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné

…agner distinguished between those who possess the gift (mentioned by God in 1 Corinthians 12) and those who hold the office of apostle. According to Wagner, the office of apostle is achieved through works and is conferred by fellow apostolic leaders. It is the public affirmation that someone has the God-endowed spiritual gift and is worthy of assuming apostolic authority. Some therefore have the gift but have not yet (if ever) earned the recogniti…

Squaring Tahrir Square

By H.A. Hellyer

…k is instinctive. It is a reflection of the indomitable power of the human spirit—and in doing what they have done in the Square, far beyond the political achievement of toppling a dictator, maybe Egyptians will inspire the world to revitalise civil society far beyond its borders. The Square provides lessons, I think, not just for the people of Egypt, but for the people of the world, who all exist in societies that are plural in some way or anothe…

What’s a Faith-Healing Congregation to Do When Measles Hits?

By Rob Shryock

…God praise for that. When George Pearsons says that they “commanded” the “spirit of measles” to leave, he’s not being figurative. Pearsons believes that you can be cured of almost any ailment by a ritual recitation of God’s word. He claimed in Sunday’s sermon that people could, “take authority over their bodies” by using “words of dominion,” saying that, “Life and death are in the power of the tongue.” In context, Pearsons’s sermon comes off as…

Occupy’s Sacred Mob and the Politics of Vagrancy

By Vincent Gonzalez

…e—is beginning for this broken-down, halfway collapsing, senile society: a spirit of examination.” In this lecture Caillois asserts that rapid changes in the notion of “the individual” (perhaps like those facilitated by capitalist globalization and ubiquitous social media) will produce a social “climate” through which only new forms of organic solidarity will survive. Furthermore, what the College did, drawing from biblical and ethnographic data o…

Five Must-Reads on the “Nones”: A Tipping Point in American Religion and Spirituality

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ornia, is at once on the margins and at the center of late modern American spirituality. Early spiritual experimentation at Esalen popularized practices such as yoga, meditation, reiki, and past-life regression, and the success of Esalen encouraged invited the development of retreat centers of myriad spiritual and traditional religious varieties across the country. As such, Esalen has played a central role in the vast commercializing of American s…

Rising Christian Right Movement, New Apostolic Reformation, Emerged as a Mid-20th Century Splinter of White Supremacy

By Keri Ladner

…during the public years of her ministry, and when Angelus Temple opened in 1923, it was America’s first megachurch. Notably, Pentecostalism has, since its founding in the early 1900s, been a racially diverse movement; the leader of the Azusa Street Revival, William Seymour, was the son of emancipated slaves in Louisiana. However, this racial diversity belies a dark theological heritage that is anything but kind to non-Whites (or, for that matter,…

Free Arabs: Satire, Disobedience, and Disclaimers

By Nabil Echchaibi

…. If there is such a thing as a defining paradigm, or at least an enduring spirit, of the Arab Spring, it has to be the fact that it never was a total revolution or a drastic historical moment with universal political preferences. The Arab Spring was and still is, as Hamid Dabashi has aptly noted in the context of the 2009 Iranian Green Movement, “an open-ended revolt, in which not just the ruling regime but also any other regime that may succeed…

Ross Douthat’s Missing Pregnant Women

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…bjects of all of the sentences just quoted: “Cultural forces,” “retreat,” “spirit,” “it,” “decadence,” and “it.” Astounding. In a paragraph where Douthat besmirches those whose choices contribute to declining fertility—accusing them of being “haunted” and unwilling to make sacrifices—he says exactly nothing about actual people. And again, he shows a breathtaking lack of attention to the trade-offs involved in the actual having of the babies, or h…