Religion Dispatches
…ronofsky’s tale is disinvested of tacky teardrops falling from the sky and cheap-trick resurrections. The reason reviewers passed over the religious is not simply, I suspect, because of religious illiteracy, but because of the received wisdom of late-modern culture that continues to dwell on a body-soul dualism, with the soul in power, the body a mere marionette. Several of the religious review sites described Randy’s body in metaphorical terms: R…
Read More…u face truly irresistible urges to spout some hateful epithet, you could always… (blush)… tweet it at yourself. 4. Get married! This will make you TOO TIRED for harassing people, LOL amirite married folks? 5. When your feverish and overblown imagination gets worked up over what you baselessly imagine are a woman’s sexual choices, just put an aspirin between your lips! Your epithet, “You’re a nasty skank!” will come out as “You’re a nifty skink!” A…
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…dimension of empathy. Perhaps the best tribute to him came from one of our number who famously and irreverently said: “I put my trust in Howard Moody and God, in that order.” We are forever grateful for this good man. ____________ Editor’s Note: As a generalist, an editor frequently must guide and shape work on unfamiliar topics. Having heard only that Rev. Moody was one of those “hip, old preachers in the Village,” I set out to do the obligatory…
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…dless of their…profession,” but I somehow doubt that sanitation workers outnumber investment bankers in SoulCycle studios (one of which is across the street from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Tribeca). Classes with popular instructors sell out in minutes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get priority booking. “Ultimately, this is what brand religion is all about: stoking emotion with a combination of scarcity and urgenc…
Read More…lf. Because, my God! the things we do to one another. [deep sigh] Well, anyway. It’s been a sad week. I’m not sure what it says that I have to get to compassion by way of Augustine, but compassion was where I intended to wind up (for those three readers still with me). Koloff, Perry, and Coleman parents: I don’t always agree with the things you tell your kids. At the same time, I know you didn’t personally invent problematic notions of purity. Als…
Read More…dy and that is morally wrong.” But, using your wife’s death to score a few cheap political points against a group of people you hate isn’t “morally wrong”? But wait, there’s more! Garlow also uses his dead wife to point out just how fake the relationships between living, loving gay and lesbian partners really are. He talks about the delight he experienced being married to his wife, something gay and lesbian people certainly couldn’t have, right?…
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…rather not disclose their membership standards. Jews were often, but not always, excluded from these patently goyisha festivities. In 1872 the first Rex, “King of Carnival,” was Jewish businessman Louis Solomon. But by the mid-twentieth century, the notable and obvious exclusion of prominent Jews from Mardi Gras merriments had become the norm. Historians and journalists of 1960s New Orleans society observed that in order to avoid embarrassment (pr…
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…to their rabbis and could conceivably move en masse. Second, they have the numbers that no other settler community has. If they decide to move back to Israel, the facts on the ground would change considerably. This does not bode well for the Settler Zionists. They know that one day, perhaps soon, there will be a peace agreement, and that agreement will include significant uprooting of facts on the ground. The more bodies living in the settlements…
Read More…th respect and hope at its heart. What about forgiveness? It can be such a cheap word. It is obnoxious the way so many people tell other people they need to forgive the wrong done to them. Often those of us who advocate forgiveness don’t know what we are talking about. Then again, there is really no end to the suffering if we can’t forgive. There is no end game. We become hateful, the way our wrongdoers were hateful, and the victory goes to the te…
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…is unethical, I wonder how he imagines those clothes in China are made so cheaply, and whether an industrial factory qualifies as a gauntlet. If Rhinehart washed his clothes himself, however, he would need a washing machine, which takes energy, and he couldn’t say he lived on a battery anymore. A commenter on Rhinehart’s post aptly called this brand of asceticism “consumption laundering”; because Rinehart doesn’t do the consumption himself, it do…
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