Religion Dispatches
…rporeal life has always been one key focus of religious attention. But the new religion of body improvement shifts the aims of asceticism; the body is no longer a means to spiritual illumination but an end in itself. “The new idea offered by the contemporary culture of cosmetic surgery,” writes Mead, “is that it is the vessel itself that we must value, rather than the soul or spirit that it contains.” Modern body perfectionists seek to transcend t…
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…with being a Christian. Of course, not all Christians agree. In fact, the New York Times reports that part of the reason plans to use New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine as a field hospital fell through is that the Episcopal leaders who engaged with Mount Sinai Health System about the possibility privately objected to the involvement of Samaritan’s Purse, whose “approach to L.G.B.T. issues runs counter to that of the Episcopal Diocese of…
Read More…ne the great digital journalism Carr is talking about. Since moving to our new home at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, RD has welcomed scores of new writers, and is on the verge of rolling out a series of key upgrades to the site—an enhanced reading experience, better integration with social media, peace on earth. (We’ll be updating via our newsletter, here.) It’s our birthday, but it’s you who deserve the party (and the g…
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…hments to its own images. In his 2002 book, Iconoclash, Latour writes: We knew (I knew!) we had never been modern, but now we are even less so: fragile, frail, threatened; that is, back to normal, back to the anxious and careful stage in which the “others” used to live before being “liberated” from their “absurd beliefs” by our courageous and ambitious modernization. Suddenly, we seem to cling with a new intensity to our idols, to our fetishes, to…
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…ive centuries ago, we face similar epistemic collapse, endemic skepticism, new and more noxious nationalisms. Our new frightening politics motivated by similar fears and irrationalities, the ever-present specter of climate change and environmental collapse, the terrifying possibilities and hope of technology—all serve to turn our world upside down as the Strasbourgeois world had been. Where then is our Carnival? Or will we, like the dancers of Str…
Read More…sion to pump up his own media profile in advance of the publication of his new book? Jeffress’ Twilight’s Last Gleaming (featuring a one-page foreword by Mike Huckabee) is due out in January. It predicts the end-times demise of the United States but counsels Christians on how they can make “America’s last days your best days” by being the “light” and “salt” of the world. Advance publicity for the book describes Jeffress as a media personality, lis…
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…I have seen as a failure of mainline Catholic and Protestant pilgrims into new digital territories to grasp the social nature of new media residing on our phones and tablets and so on—devices that connect us and the information we engage to others in our lives. As Sherry Turkle has argued, we are increasingly mapping the social function of technologies—the real human-to-human characteristics that they approximate by never truly replicate for us—on…
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…was crucial as many of its leaders are African Americans who reside in the New Orleans East neighborhood where the Vietnamese community is found. New Orleans East is a historically and predominantly African-American region—the largest in the city—so the prospects of cooperation between the two communities was vital. “Both communities have been willing to be in a relationship; it’s just that [the] process has needed assistance, and that was vision…
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…wer format, as if he was of sufficient importance to be interviewed by the news media, Tarrant’s manifesto winds through a rambling set of comments and memes expressing Islamophobia, hatred of immigrants, and a strident right-wing nationalism. Impervious to irony, the Australian Tarrant—himself a foreigner in New Zealand—demands that outsiders be forcibly removed. He shows admiration for the nationalist stance of President Trump and, like Breivik,…
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…vies shape how people, especially children, view the world. In the case of New Orleans and the myriad of cultures it holds, to stint on all of the facets that make New Orleans and Louisiana the wonderful, complex, and sometimes exasperating place that it is is a crime. Disney’s princesses, once again, may have big beautiful eyes, but while kids are enjoying the view, Disney’s hack job of deconstructing history by making it “cute” is just as destru…
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