Religion Dispatches
…period, indigenous scholar Pablo Tac (1822-1841), who was born in Mission San Luis Rey and went to Europe to study, dying tragically young. Or if I must reach back to the Spanish era, I would consider Tongva medicine woman, Toypurina (1760-1799), who led a revolt against the San Gabriel Mission in 1785. She was captured and tried, and during her testimony, she indicted the padres for their unjust treatment of native lives, lands, and cultures. Ne…
Read More
…a cynic might point out, it looks an awful lot like a privatized temple—a sangha with a profit motive; dharma for dollars. The company does not phrase its mission in quite those terms. “MNDFL exists to enable humans to feel good,” the website explains. In its DNA, the company is one half executive, one half spiritual. Burrows is a film executive-turned-life coach-turned-“spiritual tourist,” while Rinzler is a longtime meditation teacher in the Sh…
Read More
…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…
Read More
…rs, it doesn’t show that the religious right is dead because it has lost a number of figureheads from the 1970s; it shows just how successful it has been in creating a diverse bench of “anointed” leaders. When a presidential candidate reaches out to them, it shows how Doug Wead’s 1985 advice to George H.W. Bush has become a standard blueprint for winning the GOP nomination and even the presidency. His one thousand targets, though, have multiplied….
Read More
…35-year-old woman, Ashli Babbitt, had flown to Washington from her home in San Diego at the behest of Donald Trump who urged his supporters to interfere with the electoral vote tally. She had served for twelve years, including being a security guard for US Air Force bases, and had risen to the rank of Senior Airman. Her husband, who remained in San Diego, described her as an enthusiastic supporter of the President, but not emotionally unstable. Li…
Read More
…a random sample size and therefore isn’t statistically representative. The number of individuals reporting victimization in Episcopal spaces is alarming nonetheless. However, I would argue the data is more likely to under- than to overestimate the scope of the abuse that occurs. To see why, the survey results must be interpreted in light of the Episcopal Church’s larger culture of inaction around sexual violence. See no evil, hear no evil… LGBTQ+…
Read More
…hands-off approach to reported apparitions, at least in the U.S. As a diocesan archivist in Sacramento told me, when I telephoned to ask about a vision event in the Mojave Desert, “it’s nothing we’re trained about.” They get a half-dozen letters or emails every year from folks claiming they’ve seen “Christ in a marshmallow,” he added, and as far as he’s concerned, a report of apparitions is a “non-event.” Perhaps Sacramento isn’t keeping up with p…
Read More…plugged-in lifestyle doesn’t really get at the heart of the issue. I think the Amish, of all people, have it right. It’s not so much about what you as an individual are doing or not doing, as the effect technology has on the community: Why not make life easier and just put [a phone] in the house? “What would that lead to?” another Amish man asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a tel…
Read More
…ability of cell phones to be used for impure activities, some Jewish cell-phone users have requested so-called “kosher” phones. The idea is to offer conservative Jews a phone that is free of “corrupting influences” of the sort that are already avoided by ultra-orthodox Jews through a ban on television and some radio. Reuters reported in February 2008 that Bezeq Israel Telecom launched a new “kosher” landline phone service, which will block calls…
Read More
…al defectors, and seducing VIPs out of political expediency. To paraphrase San Diego State University professor Rebecca Moore—whose sisters Carolyn Layton and Annie Moore were two of Jones’ main lover/lieutenants—if any Peoples Temple constituency had the power to stop the Jonestown massacre, these women did. But in eschewing the bourgeois trappings of “proper” white femininity they wound up reinforcing a white supremacist social order that some A…
Read More