Religion Dispatches
…and during the 1980s he helped to bring the ideas of Jacques Derrida into American theology and religious studies. Starting in the late 90s, though, Taylor ventured far afield with books on architecture, computer networks, economic markets, and even Las Vegas. In 2006, he released a book of photographs of animal skeletons in the desert. Taylor’s most recent book, After God, gathers these pieces together into a wide-ranging manifesto. He insists t…
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…stories are simple enough to appeal to a younger audience, but the writers manage to throw in a good deal of mulling over fifth dimensional objects, alternate timelines, and questions about whether anyone is essentially good or evil. Finally, anime shows, which aren’t expected to fit into the neat categories that most American cartoons are, include dozens of spiritual and philosophical cartoons, including Bakemonogatari, Psycho-Pass, Kino’s Journe…
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…initas school district has an effective response to the first concern. The management and administration of the yoga program, the school insists, is internal. Assistant Superintendent Miyashiro, who has no connection with the Jois Foundation, sets the curriculum, helps choose the teachers, and monitors the results. He has the authority and the resources in place to manage the program and ensure that its content and execution it is answerable to th…
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…onomic and social policies are objectively harmful to the vast majority of Americans, especially to members of marginalized groups like the LGBTQ community, and they’re perennially unpopular. Republicans succeed largely because of unfair advantages, de jure and de facto, baked into our political system—equal Senate representation for all states regardless of population (and the refusal to consider DC’s case for statehood), combined with GOP abuse…
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…talk did skillfully blend a pollyannaish optimism with echoes of perennial American Christian calls for personal and national “spiritual revival.” This message has its origins in a pastiche; not only of 19th-century Christian economic preaching ranging from Charles Finney, Henry Ward Beecher, and Russell Conwell (of “Acres of Diamonds” fame), but also to 20th-century thought like Prosperity Gospel and Christian Reconstructionist economics. (Which…
Read More…o it. It was also a time when eugenics was publicly respected, when 75% of American colleges had departments of eugenics. Today, after the horrors of Nazism, and after decades of forced sterilization, the idea of selective breeding of humans looks demonic. But in its time, it must be recalled, it was a popular idea. Caught in the zeitgeist of the era, she made some statements that were, with the benefit of hindsight, indefensible. But she was no m…
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…needs of the world outside, but many a 1950s-model corporate dad seemed to manage that level of workaholic interpersonal distraction with only a newspaper and a neat cocktail after coming home late for dinner. At the other end of the spectrum, fantasies that the application of new technologies to traditional practices will, in themselves, enrich life in general and spirituality in particular are no less misguided. Take a recent blog post on the…
Read More…of the pieces are missing to draw a complete picture. The vast majority of Americans are left with the paltry fragments of literal truth provided by the mainstream media, fragments held together with the all-powerful glue of mythic motifs that stretch back to early Greek and biblical times, and even further. It is urgent that more and more Americans come to recognize the immense influence that non-literal, non-empirical perceptions exercise on our…
Read More…like radar, or gay-dar, but for Mormons) ping last night when he tried to manage questions about his tax returns by insisting that he had been “honest in his dealings.” LDS Church members are routinely asked if they are “honest in [their] dealings” when they interview to qualify for LDS temple worship, and those who cannot answer affirmatively cannot participate. Romney has participated in hundreds—if not thousands—of such interviews during his t…
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…g such legislative monuments? Methinks the implied continuing linkage of “American” to “white Christian” also accounts for a good bit of the obsession with Obama as an outsider: neither a true American (where is that birth certificate?), nor a true Christian. If you doubt that whiteness counts for more than the doctrine part, consider this: white Protestants who were taught to believe that Mormonism is a dreadful false religion will nevertheless…
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