Religion Dispatches
…ized family—albeit one with a healthy profit margin. Accordingly, it’s not cheap. A package of 50 classes in the Hamptons (which includes early class signups) runs for $4,000. New York magazine interviewed one New York City rider who, by the magazine’s estimate, was spending more than $21,000 on SoulCycle each year. A single class, sans early sign-up perks, costs nearly as much as a month-long membership at my local YMCA. Meanwhile, back on SoulCy…
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…give you joy, why not get rid of it to make room for what matters to you? Last week, Rhinehart published a post on his personal blog that extended this logic to his consumption of electricity. It echoed Walden’s early chapters on economy, where Thoreau detailed the materials and expenses of his life in the cabin. (The materials for building the cabin itself cost $20.12½, excluding the “timber, stones, and sand,” which he “claimed by squatter’s ri…
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…ood from as much of the world as possible, in land, natural resources, and cheap labor. What does it mean to be born in a place that measures your value, your worth, your very life by the calculus of possession? That calculus extends through time to us from those founding greed-filled moments invading our waking consciousness and driving us forward in a strange confession. We believe in competition born of the desire to possess. We believe in stri…
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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…ts. Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Faith Behind Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola Pitchstone Publishing, May 2015 Caught in the Pulpit is a close cousin to The Clergy Project, an outreach effort to “current and former religious professionals who no longer hold supernatural beliefs”—many of whom must closet their newfound skepticism to preserve their careers and communities. For Dennett, closeted atheist clergy are not simply tragic figures, they…
Read More…ce?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…
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…became the equivalent of a blockbuster. In the chaos of the era print was cheap and plentiful, and the collapse of the licensing laws insured a degree of free speech hitherto unknown in the British Isles. The World Turned Upside Down would prove so enduring that it has been an English folk ballad for more than 350 years. The song’s opening verse, “Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d. /Old Christmas is kicked out of Town” remains per…
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…ngelicals, including Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore, the cheap grace to distance themselves from their Christian nationalist coreligionists without interrogating the authoritarian aspects of their own theology, you inevitably fail to fully account for the causes of January 6. Those causes very much include common and inherently authoritarian evangelical beliefs like the theology of male “headship” and female submission, of which…
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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,…
Read More…Pope Francis as much as anyone, I need concrete actions to back up the sentiments. Until the dogma changes, talk is cheap….
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