Religion Dispatches
…an advanced adept no bodily experiences can be legitimately identified as spiritual; and points out that Christians who have acknowledged the meditative role of body practices avoid the “exaggerations and partiality” of eastern methods, which are often recommended to those insufficiently prepared. These warnings reach far beyond the question of whether or not the Catholic is putting her or his soul in danger by embracing monistic ideas that confl…
Read More…, and act in unethical, ways. (Chogyam Trungpa likewise acknowledges that “spiritual pride…is as much a problem in theistic disciplines as in Buddhism.”) The dangers posited in the Letter are explicitly spiritual, and their material outcomes are not characterized as everyday occurrences or inevitable outcomes of yoga. Jain also contends that the Letter is yogaphobic for suggesting that modern postural yoga, with its non-metaphysical emphasis on he…
Read More
…get anyone from the church to talk to him, he decides to investigate “the spirit of Scientology” by hiring actors to re-enact moments from church history, most notably the violent tirades of its current leader, David Miscavige. To make his fake movie, Theroux elicits the help of Marty Rathbun, a former high-ranking official in the Church of Scientology. Rathbun, for good reason, gets a lot of screen time. He’s an articulate, charismatic presence,…
Read More
…er essentializing definition of yoga as “a means of uniting the individual spirit with the universal spirit of God” and links yoga to a specific canonical text, the Yoga Sutras. +++ The debates described above involve attempts to define yoga in ways that limit it to within certain bounded categories of identity, belief, or behavior, such as “exercise,” “religion,” “Indian,” or “Hindu.” But yoga identities have not been static or one-dimensional. I…
Read More
…art, I’d encourage them to embark on their own pilgrimage to see where the spirit may be speaking to them. View my book as an AA meeting, take what works for you in your quest and leave the rest. Is there anything you had to leave out? Given that various odd and sundry Monty Python motifs informed portions of my pilgrimage, I penned a chapter where I asked some of my fellow pilgrims how Monty Python informed their spiritual joruneys. The result wa…
Read More
…son, which occasions Christian self examination, control of appetites, and spiritual devotion: sacrifice. KTM emphasizes sacrificing for honor, country, and God, and especially for the state of Michoacan. They require that members exemplify these virtues and many others including humility and, remarkably, religious freedom for those who believe in God. KTM claims to live by a code of ethics that is published in a small illustrated booklet entitled…
Read More
…that U.S. Catholics need to act on their faith and be on guard against “a spirit of adulation bordering on servility” that exists towards the Obama Administration. Rest assured Archbishop Chaput, that those of us who want change the church will not have a spirit of adulation towards your new administration in Philadelphia. As I have said before, and will say again, the Catholic Church in its present iteration is a broken, flawed, lawless instit…
Read More…he Ecstasy, the Laundry: If we expect community relationships to be ideal, spiritual, friendly, and enlightened, we are seeking what we can’t even expect of our own minds. To want the company of others without suffering is unrealistic. But if we avoid close relationships, we will also suffer. In a wise spiritual community we acknowledge our difficulties and choose to help one another anyway. Sometimes we will be the one to carry the blessings of s…
Read More…ely to their gay and lesbian (and transgender) members and have seen God’s spirit move in, through and around their lives. They have not accepted gay and lesbian people because it’s the path of least resistance, as Mohler implies. Some of those denominations have paid a steep price, losing members and entire congregations because of these decisions. Instead, they have done it because they have felt the Holy Spirit whisper to them that is it is the…
Read More
…dialog that we will get to know each other!” He leveraged his good-natured spirit in politics, and was elected to the city council of San Carlos, and from there, to the mayor’s office. In that position, he did what every American mayor does, he fought with the Firemen’s Union. In all his activities, he remained committed to his faith. He helped nurture and train Muslim-American leadership. He was a behind-the-scenes mover, who used his vast entrep…
Read More