Religion Dispatches
…eople who kill animals. Were Sears simply a critic and comedian shattering New Age pieties his videos would still be clever and hilarious, but Sears is a full-time life coach whose work focuses on emotional healing. When Sears notes that he too is guilty of the behaviors he lampoons, he puts himself in the far more interesting tradition of those who criticize and question the beliefs they themselves hold. I recently visited this New Age Stephen Co…
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…eligion has the corner on the borrowing and incongruity of sacred stories. New Agers who use the sweat lodge are not so much “stealing Indian religion” as they are weaving a new religion out of strands of what they believe to be old religions. Various forms of the sweat ceremony were used by Indians from Canada into southern Mexico. In the south they’re called temescals and resemble a wet sauna or steam room; tribes in the American Southwest have…
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…iberation. A first step TGL on its own, sadly, is unlikely to inspire. The new ‘New Age’ The roots of Goop lie in utopian dreams of other ways of being; the same set of impulses that drove the idea of universal human rights, jobs for all, communes, racially-integrated worlds, and both spiritual and this-worldly democracy. During the 60s and 70s, the intertwined movements for Black power, gay liberation and women’s liberation rose to prominence, ga…
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…lation that imperils gay life and livelihood, perhaps? Will we see strange new coalitions of gays and ex-gays opposing homophobic bullying? Or even stranger new dividing lines between gays, straights, and ex-gays who uphold the centrality of marriage as an institution and queers and others who support new experiments in social organization—a possibility recently postulated in a recent New York Times op-ed by former gay marriage opponent David Blan…
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…, was that you look at billboards along the freeways, and the way that the new religions, the evangelicals, promote themselves, is exactly the way that banks do. They talk about “extra interest” from God, and it’s all individuals becoming religious because they think they can get a personal benefit out of it—and the people offering the benefit are making money out of it. So it’s a business. And that’s very different from the traditional role of th…
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…nation battled European totalitarianism and Nazi genocide; how it created new struggles in America’s suburbs, fraternal organizations, schools, and courts; and how it created a rhetoric for both the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the new religious right. Through it all, Schultz brilliantly shows that between the labor-capital divide of the 1930s and the racial divide of the 1960s was an ideological contest over the religious composition of…
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…ts reassurance that the Catholic church will stand up for them. In a Daily News op/ed, Dolan described immigrants as “a gift” to New York and stated that Trump has shown a lack of concern for immigrants. And New York’s Archbishop has said nothing about deportation. Dolan’s language has indeed been mild compared to other Catholic leaders in America. Cardinal Blaise Cupich in Chicago recently told priests that if I.C.E. arrives at a church without a…
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…generations would gain access to unprecedented riches of learning, as each new scholar’s wisdom could be passed on to new communities. The Talmud is a heavily edited literary compilation, not a record of a single conversation, so even though it’s presented as a live issue in the story, the very fact that readers are encountering the tale in the Talmud—a work literally made possible by the technology in debate—means that writing down rabbinic teach…
Read More…s’ anti-gay efforts in Africa, discusses their role in the Uganda law in a new video interview with The Real News Network; Kaoma, a researcher with Political Research Associates, played a central role in God Loves Uganda, a documentary on the same topic. In a related story, Ethiopian Minister of Women, Children and Youth reportedly tweeted in opposition to the new Ugandan law, but her twitter account was then shut down amid government claims that…
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…tants. As much as I admire and respect Robinson, I fear that the legacy of New England Protestantism is far more problematic than she suspects. Yes, the New Englanders eventually fought the Southern slave masters but not until after two centuries of profiting from the business of slavery. Yes, the Yankees came to abhor slavery but they also abhorred—and persecuted—the free people of color in their midst. Yes, they spoke out against the annexation…
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