Religion Dispatches
…merous religions, including Hindu, Jain, and New Age traditions, have constructed and reconstructed it anew. Even Hindu forms of yoga vary widely in ideology and practice. Thus yoga does not belong to Hinduism nor any other monolithic tradition. But evangelical Christians have an odd bedfellow in the argument for a monolithic vision of yoga as Hindu: some Hindus. They reflect the same ahistorical, religiously fundamentalist tendencies, but with an…
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…ions any easy assumptions that a feminist politics must adhere to specific rules about the body—rules that are dictated by either religious authority, state authority, or by fellow feminists. It’s simpler, in some ways, to assume that religion and feminism are at odds. It’s easier to assume, perhaps, that religion is simply the provenance of those who use tools like pro-life politics to fight feminist agendas. It’s much more complicated to think o…
Read More…ay Saints’ compound) in Eldorado. If so, you were hardly alone. For weeks, headlines have trumpeted the sex with underage girls, teenage pregnancies, and forced marriages that appeared to be the sect’s stock-in-trade. The court, however, found little hard evidence that minors were in physical danger or were victims of abuse. The children were members of a group with an unusual belief system. But the Texas court, in line with earlier Supreme Court…
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…e same conflicts as religious. Because religion is more prominent in their worldviews. That’s why some people in the Muslim world link the Prophet Muhammad cartoons to a larger, perceived war on Islam. Because these conflicts are seen religiously. We don’t see it that way, and would protest that we are prosecuting a religious war; for us, race, nationalism, and even the fact of democracy function as religion does. They make causes sacred, and just…
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…imilarly critical of Clinton. It is earthly power itself that’s seen as corrupt; Trump just offers a spectacularly rich example to pair with scriptural critiques. So is this Christian thought? Is this religion? Decades ago, at the peak of the move to stigmatize contemporary religious claims under the derogatory label of “cult,” scholars spoke of the so-called “cultic milieu,” understood as a kind of shadowy underworld of kooky theories, conspiracy…
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…d (and then recalculated) doomsday predictions are of more curiosity than true salvific concern. Camping has been buried by subsequent news cycles and is the latest member of a cadre of religious leaders whom the Apocalypse passed by. But while May’s Apocalypse seems to have skipped over most of the world, it did land squarely on a hilltop in north-western Vietnam. It would behoove us to take notice of the complex and unexpected ways in which this…
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…ress who are incumbents. Oh, a hundred percent. And the thing is, because Trump is in many ways being run by super far-right conservative Christians, it’s made space in this administration and in several branches of government for folks who really do subscribe to these apocalyptic, bifurcated us-versus-them, good-versus-evil, views. This is why you’ve got people, and again in front of the entire country, casting out demons, and preventing against…
Read More…when the church prayed that God’s will would be done.” In the Pentecostal world, and accordingly in the political world, there is a lot of that there is a lot of cross-pollination and sharing and borrowing (and in some cases, plagiarizing) of ideas and strategies. There’s a lot of money to be made in conferences, books, CDs and DVDs of conferences, tithes and offerings, and so forth. Having a “new” prophesy about what God is telling you to do can…
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…d in regicide plots, a martyr. The Hands and Feet of Jesus For the secular world, however, the issue is its lagging understanding of what the Christian mission in the 21st-century world might be. Its ears are so accustomed to the arrogant certainties of the Christian Right, it can only assume that any Christian martyr worth his salt (surely an allusion to a pithy saying of Jesus) must be a Bible-smuggler who, in the name of Western hegemony, is de…
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…o do the same thing is important. We’re narrative creatures. We hear these stories and we believe, and the more stories you hear about something, the harder it is not to believe it, especially from people who you respect, because that’s the core of social learning: looking toward people who have the accumulated knowledge in a culture and trying to get it from them. When people who we respect or who have status are sharing these same stories, it be…
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