Religion Dispatches
…s a much longer history with many who we might in the modern Western world classify as “mad” being treated as holy fools in other cultures. And of course, this history of mental illness may explain why Amanda is such a blabbermouth and says things that are so destructive to the interests of her family. Then, again, depending on how we read the segments where she is chasing her brother, she may be neither sacred nor mad, but simply the victim of so…
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…r, the Tao-Te-Ching, and other exotic classics are endlessly repurposed as business manuals, dating manuals, or quote-mines for calendars, served up by beaming gurus whose bios tend to emphasize spiritual intuition over formal education. The Tao of Happiness: Stories from Chuang Tzu for Your Spiritual Journey Derek Lin Tarcher November 17, 2015 In keeping with this formula, Lin opens the The Tao of Happiness by telling readers that “in Chinese cul…
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…its construction displaced. Through eminent domain, 37 blocks of homes and businesses in the thriving black St. Louis community were razed to make room for a monument to the United States’ western expansion. To add insult to injury, discriminatory hiring policies made many of the promised construction jobs unavailable to non-white residents. Upon its completion in 1965, it would be dedicated “to the American people.” More than five decades after i…
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…ntury and sought to provide protection for Jews who were treated as second-class citizens in both Christian Europe and Muslim countries for many hundreds of years. The desire for a safe haven made perfect sense, though the antagonism that they encountered from many Palestinians made perfect sense as well given the previous history of Western colonialism and Christian crusades. Palestinians saw the Jews as an invading force that would uproot their…
Read More…d well. As Joffe points out, soon after the transvaginal-as-rape meme took flight, “Will abortion clinic staff who perform the ultrasound be seen as ‘rapists,’ as the provider I mentioned earlier worried? This is a possibility not lost on the anti-abortion website LifeNews, which recently ran the headline, ‘If Ultrasound is Rape, Arrest Planned Parenthood Staffers.’” Trudeau doesn’t get this. He told the Washington Post, of the Texas ultrasound la…
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…f the AIDS pandemic. Fortunately, at least for those within the chattering classes, life expectancy–and good health expectancy–continue to rise among well-educated white people. Most c-class commentators, including the New York Times editorial board, are taking a sharp breath over this despairing news but are not rushing to conclusions about what must be done. Not so the fearless fusilladiers at First Things: boss editor R.R. Reno plunged right in…
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…They came from the gut-wrenching experiences of the Southern rural working class, people who were poor recruits for the modernist fundamentalism of conservative townspeople, and difficult material to mold into an organized movement. [Note: John Hayes’ dissertation “Hard, Hard Religion: Faith and Class in the New South” (University of Georgia, 2007) plumbs their experience as well as anyone ever has.] Once, after hearing a moving address at an acad…
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…ushed through the NAFTA and WTO agreements even though millions of working-class Democrats and thousands of US manufacturing centers were cruelly slaughtered along the way. That carnage is by now very well documented. With a handful of exceptions, neither Mexican workers nor US workers received any benefits at all from the NAFTA, whereas a very significant part of our current immigration problem stems from its devastating and crippling effects ins…
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…nservatism that has stoked anger and despair among the left-behind working class. As the Dalai Lama and Arthur Brooks wrote recently, the answer to the despair sweeping through increasingly superfluous working-class communities is both spiritual and temporal. What’s needed, they say, is a concerted effort to “create a wealth of opportunities for meaningful work, so that everyone who is capable of contributing can do so.” Telling people “you should…
Read More…m, but the hollow rhetoric barely touched the lives of the upper to middle classes. One morning, a girl in class ridiculed my scarf and said it was frumpy and silly. Another argued that it wasn’t required in Islam. “There’s precious little we can do to be pretty in our silly school uniforms,” another said. “And you want to bring that scarf into the picture.” I got irritated. I was, after all, only 15. “I’m only doing what I’m supposed to do,” I sn…
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