Religion Dispatches
…se who do tends to skew our perceptions). And while all sorts of class dynamics can shape denominational membership, extraordinarily few spiritual communities place a fixed cost barrier to entry. SoulCycle isn’t a church. But it certainly wants to look like a happy universalistic spiritualized 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) ru…
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…was very little will in the UK to pursue any of the regulation that the committee recommended for microtargeting and those issues. So we kind of wondered, what’s the conclusion of this film? Where does it go? Because Charles had placed himself at the middle of this story, people kept coming to him with evidence. One of them, Brent Allpress, who you’ve seen in the film, just said, listen, I’ve got this connection between Cambridge Analytica and chu…
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…ous ecstasy (i.e., Kabbalistic mythologies) and chemical imbalances in the mind (i.e., migraines). Aronofsky is too smart to deal in binaries, and so even back then he was already dissecting this material-spiritual difference with that of artificial intelligence (i.e., computers gaining self-awareness), chaos theory applied to the stock market, and the simple search for love and connection in the world. In the end, Pi’s protagonist Maximillian Coh…
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…n creates more volatility and greater risk. What was developed in order to minimize risk has exacerbated it. When you were writing, what hopes did you have for the book? What hopes can you have for a book? How has its reception lived up to that? It’s still early. I don’t know where the book is traveling right now. Over the years I’ve written in so many different areas. Hegel says that the owl of Minerva only takes flight at twilight. You can only…
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…s that he might’ve been. I don’t think it’s because Aronofsky’s Noah has a mixture of admirable and flawed elements that he raises fundamentalist suspicions. It’s because he has a mixture of any kind at all. Progressive religion values complexity and nuance; traditional religion values simplicity. Noah’s character flaws, which make him interesting to progressives, hit sour notes for traditionalists— indeed, like blue notes corrupting the C-major h…
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…s, you sit in a comfortable seat and wear odd glasses and stare into the luminescent world of Pandora. Familiar stories begin to emerge, depending 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 pra…
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…that the Obamas had with them, as seen at the 2016 Easter Egg Roll), welcoming families and young children and sincerely trying to show them a good time was never the goal of the Trump administration. In order to understand the real goal of this event, we need to head over to the Egg Roll “reading nook.” To watch the videos of the reading nook, held outdoors on a day when temperatures struggled to climb out of the 40s, is to give the children cre…
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…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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…ublingly, establishment Democrats like Biden seem unwilling to hear that comity with unreconstructed bigots will only legitimize and empower them in their authoritarian lust for power, causing severe harm to—to use a biblical turn of phrase—“the least of these.” If you want a united populace, you also need to take pluralism and inclusion seriously. The NPB may be organized by a private foundation, but it’s also a highly publicized event in which e…
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…don’t mean it. We don’t act on it. Yet we keep saying it.” The election of Michael Steele as chairman of the Republican National Committee marks a concrete attempt to put some distance between the GOP and the religious right. Many religious conservatives opposed his candidacy, largely because of his association with the centrist Republican Leadership Council, a group he co-founded with Christine Todd Whitman and John Danforth, both vocal critics o…
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