Religion Dispatches
…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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…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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…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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…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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…r the children of atheist lesbian couples are simply not welcome here. The cheap paperback Easter stories read by Sanders and Conway—no doubt ordered the day before from Amazon Prime—had nothing to do with teaching, or welcoming, or even celebrating a Christian holiday (inappropriate as that itself would have been at a White House event). As this administration did with its craven and phony defense of “Merry Christmas” as if it were an endangered…
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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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…, more humane, more united country; I certainly would. But there can be no cheap or easy unity in a country torn apart by an increasingly fascist Right. Troublingly, 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, y…
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…e staid mores of their class by celebrating NASCAR, megachurches, guns and cheap American beer. They congratulated themselves for being more in touch with everyday people than their snobby peers. And then something changed, and suddenly they realized they had little in common with people like Joe the Plumber and the acolytes of Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin. Social conservatives, especially the religious right, have become a bit of an embarrassmen…
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…l that divides us, whatever it is. The bread and wine we use is materially cheap and unsatisfying; what we experience in them is supposed to come from a wealth beyond. In the presence of God, and among people of different races, classes, and opinions, the mass should nourish us in our common humanity. So whom exactly is one harming by boycotting, by staying home in solitary prayer? The earthly Church might miss your money in the collection—that’s…
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…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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