Religion Dispatches
…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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…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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…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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…But instead of inspiring figures of human potential, they come off more as cheap foils that Brooks is using to market his theories to the wealthy, literate class of policy wonks that he hopes will take his ideas seriously. More, Brooks is no Rousseau. And no novelist. If there is something mildly, warmly inspiring about his theoretical claims, they fall flat when explored through the medium of these sadly hollow characters. Brooks is perhaps best…
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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…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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…cts, images of a white dude who is supposed to be Jesus, and so on and on. Numbers appear through this book, sometimes with numbing frequency and volume. Thousands of Bibles in the early years of the ABS; tens of thousands some decades later; millions and millions through the course of the twentieth century. The numbers document the stunning capacity of the ABS to flood the zone with Scriptures. Through the book, the ABS accomplished exactly that…
Read More…gths, and the great expense of a high-power law firm, to try to score some cheap political points on the backs of same-sex couples.” I suppose Boehner can pander to the religious right and continue to defend “traditional” marriage, but I think it’s fair to ask why—when jobless rates continue to hover near 10 percent—which issue may be most important to God: how people arrange their intimate relationships, or how we feed and care for those families…
Read More…the reductive “purity” rhetoric with something reductive of my own, like a cheap criticism that Christianity is anti-sex and anti-body. Which brings me to Augustine’s Confessions, and specifically, reading Augustine’s Confessions with my Intro Theology class this week. Internet, I love Augustine Confessions. I love, love, love, love Augustine’s Confessions. I love it even when I want to throw it across the room and curse. It’s a complicated love,…
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…aders caught up in sex scandals, and most commentators predicted this same cheap grace for Falwell when he was recently forced to take an indefinite leave of absence from Liberty after posting a picture of himself with his pants unzipped, his arm around the waist of a similarly (un)dressed woman who was not his wife, and a glass of something that looked suspiciously like alcohol in his hand. According to two experts on evangelicals and gender, how…
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