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From ‘Management Gurus’ to ‘Corporate Chaplains’: A Review of Spirituality Inc.

…ompanies like Hobby Lobby are not called upon to explain their reliance on cheap goods and labor. Exploitative working conditions, even if ones tucked out of sight in overseas factories, can’t be justified by religious rhetoric. Bethany Moreton, author of the recent To Serve God and Wal-Mart, spoke with me about these contradictions. “Evangelical interpretations of sin as personal vice have obscured the structural injustices even in a Christian mo…

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The Moral Bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Asceticism

…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…

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Doubt v. Predator: A Vatican II Parable

…l made in the play, but it’s still clear: Doubt paints a picture, from the cheap seats of the Bronx, of the Church in mid-transformation. But things are even more complicated than that, as the story is also an elaborate critique of the way power is wielded in the Church—and the fact that Vatican II managed to change very little. Sister Aloysius is paralyzed by her position, unable to do anything about Father Flynn directly because the Monsignor wi…

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Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Avatar and the Myth of Originality

…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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Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

…e in effect subsidized the expansion of the American economy through their cheap labor, the provisions in the bill allowing for a path to legalization were hard to defend. Into this vacuum come restrictionist voices that frame the issue in purely individualistic, ahistoric terms: hordes of immigrants are coming in, willfully breaking our laws, selfishly taking advantage of this country’s freedoms and resources. Here the word “illegal” becomes a ra…

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Noah v. Kitschy Jesus: A Tale of Two Movies

…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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Lindsey Graham’s Lying “Eye-ranians”

…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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RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

…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…

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Pop-Eye: Meat The Wrestler

…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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SoulCycle Looks to Sell its Soul

…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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