Religion Dispatches
…that of death. We watched. On smartphones and tablets and laptops and televisions, we watched real people die. As Luvvie Ajayi has written, these images and videos “desensitize us to black death” and numb us to the violence done against black bodies—a powerful truth that collides with questions about death and how to treat it reverently in this digital age. This week, instead of watching people die, we are playing Pokémon Go. In just a few days, t…
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…evangelical. The term “non-denominational” is supposed to connote a non-affiliation with traditional denominations. It is supposed to, as my fellow churchgoers put it, “avoid the stigma of Christianity.” Instead of calling themselves Christians, many evangelicals call themselves disciples—an attempt to more closely replicate the first-century church. The purpose of this language is two-fold. First, it distances the non-denominational/evangelical c…
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The Austin Chronicle recently reported that a local filmmaker is raising funds for a comedy inspired by the mass suicides of the Heaven’s Gate group. When 39 members of this group killed themselves—claiming that their consciousnesses would be transported to a spaceship, which they believe may have been hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet—the media hyped this incident as “the worst mass suicide in U.S. history” (not counting Jonestown, which occurre…
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And it came to pass after the captivity of Israel and the desolation of Jerusalem that Jeremiah sat mourning and he lamented this lament. Kendrick Lamar’s Untitled Unmastered (UU), surprise-released at the beginning of this month, paints an intimate portrait of the artist’s emotional, psychological and religious pro/digression. And for me it hits close to home. Kendrick’s lyrics reflect existential questions authors like Kelly Brown Douglas and I…
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…f Mental Disorders included an entry for gross stress reaction. In the DSM-II, the entry was removed. “The most plausible explanation for the omission is that the concept was closely linked to warfare and combat, and DSM-II was written in a peaceful era,” writes Andreasen. The timing could not have been much worse. America’s involvement in the Vietnam War was just beginning to escalate; the DSM-II was published the same year as the Tet Offensive….
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If John Dorhauer is successful in implementing his vision as the new General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ he may be a transformational figure—not only in this historic denomination, but in the history of Protestantism itself. Whatever history may ultimately record, there is no question that Dorhauer views transformation as necessary to sustain the “missional core” of the Church in our time. Beyond Resistance: The Institut…
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“They believe in some strange religion, not Islam,” a Muslim refugee from the Iraq city of Ramadi told me when I talked with him recently in a camp near the Kurdistan capital of Erbil in Northern Iraq. ISIS territory was some 40 miles away, but he spoke as if they could return at any moment. “They reject our religion and say we are not sufficiently Muslim, but they kill the men and rape the women. What kind of Islam is that?” Though his religious…
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…t of secular modernity, when Catholics were opening the windows of Vatican II and American theologians were delving into what was known as the gospel of Christian Atheism, a California dance band re-named themselves, and the Warlocks became the Grateful Dead. #6 : “Ripple” is a Spiritual Manifesto by Jim Burklo The Dead sang, plucked, and pounded inexorably onward toward a palpably approaching ecstasy with no knowable when, where, or how… #7 : I L…
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…tial candidate Mike Huckabee, not known for shying away from hot-button religious culture war battles, “visited by phone” with Rowan County, Kentucky court clerk Kim Davis yesterday, according to a statement issued by his campaign. “I let her know how proud I am of her for not abandoning her religious convictions and standing strong for religious liberty,” the former pastor, Arkansas governor, and now two-time presidential candidate said in a stat…
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…it, neuroscience is just brains studying brains. One upshot of this reflexivity is a funny kind of loop: studying the brain tells you about being a self; being a self offers up questions about the brain. More, perhaps, than participants in any other scientific field, neuroscientists can oscillate between the hard data of the physical world and the loftier questions of self and soul. That kind of back-and-forth has been central to the career of Da…
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