Religion Dispatches
…in mind. I can name the people who were my imagined audience. I have their numbers in my cell phone. There are, of course, lots of other people I would invite to eavesdrop on this solipsistic soliloquy. I’d like Bataille scholars to read the book. I’d like people who’ve never heard of Bataille to read the book. I’d like feminist and queer theologians—and those scholars who study queer theory—to read it. And if a serious scholar of Bacon’s or Mappl…
Read More…the audience, of course, loves it. The focus of Gamera 3 is on the human impact of this sort of tragedy, and Cloverfield, shot in shaky, first-person video, is all about human impact. But what is the sin that the monster is punishment for? In short, it’s self-absorption: the characters in this film search for cell phone chargers while the world falls down around them. In one key scene (that appears in the trailer), the monster hurls the head of th…
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…ok. I read it. I realized there is something here after all. So that was a parallel. My personal inner work was parallel with my academic work in a way. Although I never made the connection between God and what I had studied with the Gurdjieff teaching. It was not a religion, it was something else. It wasn’t called a religion, wasn’t meant to be equated with religion. And there were reasons for that. I think Gurdjieff felt that the language of rel…
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…I have hand-counted 29 non-NOM staffers attending the rally—about the same number that have attended every other event on this tour.” They were outnumbered by those who came in support of marriage equality. … about 95 marriage equality supporters marched in to the event to counter-protest NOM on a sidewalk across from the event. Impressive. Once again, NOM has been embarrassed on this tour, drawing significantly fewer supporters to their event tha…
Read More…r the number of people to anticipate. Right now, we anticipate 100 Mormons participating. I hope it will grow. This is an invitation for people to be proactive. I know Pride is on a Sunday, and it’s a big deal for people to miss church. I understand that. This is an invitation to worship by walking, to worship by using our bodies—Mormon theology has a very specific place for bodies; our spirits came to earth to get bodies—and we are physically put…
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…ed by ordinary human means, outside Jewish law and beyond the awareness or participation of Mary’s lawful husband? Does it matter if Hitler is proclaimed a god, and Jesus a bastard? The self-appointed custodian of limitless freedom of speech would say: No. Take the poison with the perfume. It may hurt, but restricting it or any form of insult is worse. It undermines the basis of a democratic, inclusive worldview; it cuts to the core of Western ci…
Read More…ace. We’d made plans to meet up in case we got separated and had exchanged phone numbers. In the middle of the tawaf, the call to prayer came. The guards stopped the tawaf. Some people complied and started to form lines. I found a spot between two women, each with their husbands, and sat down on the line. This seemed an ideal spot until a woman in black niqab squeezed in on my left just as we started the prayer. Okay then. Before we had completed…
Read More…tor of Perry’s prayer rally scheduled for August 6. His group did not just participate in a single phone call, as Amy Sullivan reported at TIME, but gathered for a two-day meeting June 21-22, which was a follow-up to a meeting Robison convened last September. The same day that Robison wrote in a blog post that “Christians must respond to the invitation issued by the prophet Joel to ‘return to God’,” Perry announced his rally, saying, “Some problem…
Read More…us values, most bit back. Reddit peers verbally tore “european_douchebag” apart, castigating him for not only taking a creepy smartphone picture of an innocent young woman, but for taunting her based on her physical appearance—a physical appearance that, in her mind (the only one that matters) is divinely inspired. Of course the woman’s appearance only seems odd to some because of our own culturally mutated and narrow-minded gender norms. The virt…
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…d neither of us has a concrete answer to this question. Assuming that most participants haven’t already thought this through, the answer they choose after mere seconds of consideration isn’t likely to reflect any longstanding, steadfast belief. “Polls are hastily done by telephone rather than in person,” Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow said in a recent interview with The Cubit. “If you’re a respondent in a poll, you’re being asked anywhere fr…
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