Religion Dispatches
…modern sense. That is why certain later people are identified by this same Spirit to be the elected readers for their generation, offered a way to crack the hidden codes of divine scripture. In most cases, the very belief that a given reader of the Apocalypse had been divinely appointed carried with it the clear implication that those times must be very close. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need such a close and spiritually esoteric reading at all. If tha…
Read More…as often as he has done about such things. And he seemed to intensify his spirited concern by rehearsing a vision from Hildegaard of Bingen, one in which the Church appeared to her as sullied, diseased, and literally torn apart. The blame for the Church’s state lay with none other than her priests. In that vision, Benedict concludes, the Church “is stained with dust, and this is how we have seen it. Her garment is torn–by the sins of priests.” Bu…
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…tion: “We were conquered because we failed to understand that Victory is a Spirit, and that it is in ourselves and in ourselves alone that we must attack and destroy Ialdaboath.” One can substitute “the bourgeoisie” or “capitalist hegemony” for “Ialdabaoth” and still get the same anarchist idealism; i.e. that revolution can only succeed if it begins and ends with reforms in the mind. Lusty Angels and Lesbian Grape-Pickers Not only are there some p…
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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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…n, and Audre Lorde, each of whom had prior track records of engaging black spiritual traditions in their work. Where Larry Neal’s afterword to Black Fire advocated a spiritual integrity styled after the male preacher, Toni Cade Bambara called attention to the shortcomings of that model. Her own essay in the volume, “On the Issue of Roles,” took up the topic of religion both to illustrate the problem and propose some provisional alternatives. In do…
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…ches to the ancient myths. At the same time the new religious movements of Spiritualism and Theosophy, both founded by women, gave her new channels to understand a revived sense of the sacred. Among a significant minority of thinkers of her age, Gage also recognized that she was living in lands that continued to be inhabited by native people, and she turned to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) societies, finding a strikingly different approach to gende…
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…panied by a passage from the proverbial frying pan to the fire of the Holy Spirit. Here Fluker plays on the ambivalence of fire in the context of black strivings. While it can refer to racialized violence and destruction (lynching, the burning of black churches), it also alludes to the experience of being overwhelmed, and consumed, by the Spirit. Fire here signifies passion and life. Fire is that energy that takes an individual beyond herself, ope…
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…ery clear that the exhortation and surrounding conversations are “the Holy Spirit speaking” and, per the National Catholic Reporter, that the document is “faithful to the doctrine and to the teaching of the church.” At one level, all of these debates impact LGBT people and their families because the specifics of pastoral guidelines and the new openness to accompanying all people that is intended by Pope Francis can have very real consequences, pos…
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…ecipice of the ultimate battle between good and evil came with Wikileaks’ “Spirit Dinner” tweet alleging that Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta was invited to a satanic “Spirit Dinner” where human blood, breast milk and semen would be included in the meal. Wikileaks, and the media response to this accusation, brought forward the conspiratorial link to Hillary Clinton working for Evil, and Donald Trump as the hero for Good. The linking of cons…
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…eran or Presbyterian was. Now most people who still believe with a gracing Spirit don’t really care what they are in the first place. That applies unless you are the type of conservative Christian who has a theology of blame and shame or what I call “punishmentalism.” Then you still want to “get it right.” The mainlines are the old lines, and the evangelicals’ dogmatism will soon be there as well. Gratia always escapes religious tendrils and chain…
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