Religion Dispatches
…gs between scientists and Buddhists. In 2005, for example, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet was invited by the Stanford University School of Medicine to dialogue with a panel of distinguished neuroscientists. In short, Buddhist Americans and their work should not be overlooked. Indeed, how helpful a Buddhist representative might be on something like the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships! One hopes t…
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…expectation from the traditional “silver dagger” song that this is perhaps 1909 or 1939, but certainly not within our lifetime). Whatever it was that happened, it could not have been entirely pretty: Seems every castle is made of sand The Great Destroyer sleeps in every man Here comes my baby, here comes my man With the silver dagger in his hand. And how can all these stories of barroom girls, morphine addicts, rape victims, murdering ghosts, and…
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…from Eddy’s teaching that “there is no material world, only Thought, Mind, Spirit, Goodness, Love” to contemporary motivational coaches who preach a similar “mystical notion”: “the world is dissolved in Mind, Energy, and vibrations, all of which are potentially subject to our conscious control.” In both cases, the right kind of thinking is good for what ails you. Near the end of his career, Twain himself wrote a series of articles on Eddy and her…
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…aditions. One such movement was the Society for Ethical Culture, founded in 1876 by Felix Adler, a Reform Jew who created a post-Jewish religion of “deed rather than creed.” The Sunday morning meetings of the original New York Society for Ethical Culture included music and a spoken address. Membership drew from the upper echelons of New York society, including many prominent Jewish leaders. Adler’s reason for holding such ritualistically bare serv…
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…contentious issues like abortion and gay rights. It endorsed (at least in spirit) the then-existing version of the Ryan-DeLauro bill, and touted the blessing of evangelical figures who said they were rejecting the single-issue, rancorous politics of their religious right brethren. They would, they pledged, abandon the trench warfare of Roe v. Wade, and instead try to find practical solutions for reducing abortions. Stigmatizing Abortion? The relu…
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…Many a Romantic artist has said the same: the self must clear out for the spirit of creativity to enter. Loss of self is perceived as fulfillment of self. Now enter the lover in love, long venerated by poets and rhapsodes of all stripes, starting with the lyrical Lesbian, Sappho herself. The lover who tries to leave reason in control, she warns, does not follow her god to the end. It is the very chaos of love, the swirl of love, that may link our…
Read More…hat difficult economic times signify a lack of faith at best, and a sinful spirit at worst? So where are they now? Where are these preachers as parishioners’ mortgages continue to default and gas prices bust the average working family’s budget? Where are they as families fall into an economic tailspin due to unforeseen job losses and out of control healthcare costs? And where are they as parishioners increasingly discover that the extravagant luxu…
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…ate and prepare him for entry into a new social and spiritual realm; in the 1600s and 1700s, these rituals created a buzz of fear and suspicion around the Masons, which only added to their popularity. Masonic lodges proliferated in America from the 1720s onward. They were a religious movement as well as a social networking sensation, a pre-electronic Facebook. At first they recruited only affluent gentlemen and professionals, then later a broader…
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…only tether between us? And my scripture, handy-dandy rolodex of the Holy Spirit, flips up this verse: What does the believer have in common with the unbeliever? Light cannot be yoked with darkness. I know. I know. I’d say I’m the devil’s advocate, but I’m afraid you’d take me seriously. Look—you’re drawing the boundaries between us again. Let me ask for a huge favor: can those borders at least consist of a dashed line, one with some space betwee…
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…raven images. We’re not going to let that stop us. In true rugged American spirit, we must do the hard work and pull ourselves up from our bootstraps, which, if you’ll watch the safety demonstration video on the small screen in front of you, you’ll see can be found under your thobes. (No, not the wires—don’t pull on those just yet.) Here’s how American Muslims can make Halloween a little bit more frightful. For the trick-or-treater The best part o…
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