Religion Dispatches
…on of hands, and women’s washings and anointings before childbirth. In the 1990s some feminists who restored these elements of Mormon history to our consciousness were excommunicated. When I saw the Dinner Party, I was dismayed to find that the place Chicago set for Hutchinson was designed in colors of grief and mourning, sadness and loss. No doubt, her life was not easy, but I prefer to remember Hutchinson—and others like her—as women who refuse…
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…n starred on that show, dominating the airwaves with childlike wisdom, from 1927 through 1943 when the youngest of the clan, Franny, signed off for the very last time. The Glass children, that is to say, found their spiritual careers bookended by the World Wars. Then they took their radio profits and went to college, each one in their turn. You see Salinger’s point; no GI Bill in this family; spirituality paved their ways to a degree. We learn mos…
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…told me before the exhibit that politics cannot sustain itself without the spirit. These political movements that are happening are very important, but the undercurrent of these movements is a desire to change the spiritual consciousness of the community first and the society second. When black women decide to heal, the community heals, and then the society heals. Oftentimes, we’re at the forefront of political and cultural change. There is a need…
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…f their faith in the public square. The counterfeit here is the collective spirit, the shared attitude they exhibit together (like a church). That collective spirit has very little to do with the worship of a marginalized Jew, named Jesus, who came to free the poor and oppressed. This counterfeit Christian community worships power, desires control, and imagines the world revolving around self-sufficient men (and a few women). I call it “Mad Man Re…
Read More…he Ecstasy, the Laundry: If we expect community relationships to be ideal, spiritual, friendly, and enlightened, we are seeking what we can’t even expect of our own minds. To want the company of others without suffering is unrealistic. But if we avoid close relationships, we will also suffer. In a wise spiritual community we acknowledge our difficulties and choose to help one another anyway. Sometimes we will be the one to carry the blessings of s…
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…gion in China, Japan, Islamic societies, and the United States published in 1970 in his book of essays, Beyond Belief, illustrates that point. In his 1967 essay in Daedalus on “Civil Religion,” Bellah founded a whole new enterprise for religious studies scholars: probing the political significance of religious ideas and the religious significance of political ones. In this case it was Emile Durkheim that Bellah evoked, taking up Durkheim’s notion…
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…national ideal “which would lead to a revitalization of the revolutionary spirit of the young republic, so that Americans would once again attract the hope and love of its citizens”? Bellah is invested, even piously so, in American civil religion, and feels called to rally us in its behalf. Habits of the Heart simply intensifies the image of Bellah’s pastoral concern for the moral health of the republic, threatened as it is by impoverishing indiv…
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…uel’s Pulse: Pulse / cardiovascular movement / on the dance floor / sacred spirit’s thumb and strum / now under cardiac / arrest’s / storm and stress / Pulse’s Emanuel / a metaphysical condition of holy ghostliness on the dance floor / feel the beat / breath’s percussive rhythm / pulsation’s respiration / its aspirational inhalation / its exasperational exhalation / Emanuel’s Pulse, a “pneumatic pact“ In Charleston and now Orlando, last year was t…
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…tion instead of a church, mosque or schul, the links between understanding spirituality as the work of the spirit, or of the soul, become less and less meaningful. So what’s behind this newest set of numbers? Reasons people list for leaving religion remain about the same as they were in the Pew survey, but with some striking differences. Those who have “stopped believing” in a tradition’s teachings are now at 60 percent, those from families that w…
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…ut the biggest claim Dougherty makes in his piece, of course, is about the spirit of the ecumenical council—that it created a “new faith.” It’s an old song within the Church. If a constant refrain within Catholicism is ecclesia semper reformanda (“the church is always being reformed”), then there’s always someone else complaining that those reforms have perverted the “true” nature of Christianity. Dougherty makes it clear, and takes it further, wh…
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