Religion Dispatches
…New Life Church’s World Prayer Center once… …I would like to do that. It’s cheap and they have hotel rooms—prayer closets, they call them. Or take the Crystal Cathedral. Right. Philip Johnson, who was a leading postmodern architect, designed the Crystal Cathedral. So what’s going on? As these systems become more complex, they become more volatile. As they become more volatile, you have to figure out how, in the economic realm, to manage risk. You…
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…e solution: develop Haredi communities in the territories where housing is cheap (through government subsidies), where they can maintain a lifestyle separate from secular Israel, and where their communities can continue to grow at an enormous rate. This is a particularly modern problem. The growth rate of the Haredi world is not solely the result of their big families. When you have a society that is essentially middle-class averaging seven childr…
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…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…
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…th in ways we haven’t imagined or prepared for. In a class I’m teaching at Chicago Theological Seminary called “A Practical Theology of the Corpse,” I asked my students to describe their notion of a Good Death in the 21st Century. They said the kinds of things you’d probably say, too, if you took a moment to think about the question: dying peacefully and without pain (or at least with well-managed pain), dying in old age, dying at home, drifting o…
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…ect, because people like Tonéx were interviewed on YouTube, there were thousands—tens of thousands of emails [and other responses]—can you use a curse word on Religion Dispatches? Oh, I think so. When Cadillac Kennedy did that anti-Eddie Long tape: “Dick-sucking Eddie Long! You’re wrong!” She got over a million views. So what’s coming in are a huge number of statements. Many of them are typically homophobic, “God is not mocked,” “you’re going to…
Read More…about organized religion, doesn’t it? [RB]: Yes, and like, tonight I’m in Chicago and I’ll do an event, and the level of electricity, of excitement, and the number of people who say: “I always had these questions, I always wondered about this, I always knew there was another way to understanding this…” It’s really… It blows me away. Every night, at one of these events, I just… Wow. What an amazing thing to be a part of. [WG]: Tell us, what has be…
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…ing philosophical and practical in-between pointed to by the growth in the number of those who self-identify as religiously unaffiliated. Take the 36-year-old nonprofit director from Chicago who describes herself as “something like an atheist… most days.” She insists that being an unbeliever has no bearing on her almost daily prayer practice: Do I need to believe in God to say that I pray? No. I just pray. I focus my intention on the gratitude I h…
Read More…under not good, and the country’s most famous democratic personality, Ang San Suu Kyi, has been disturbingly quiet, preferring not to speak out; whatever her reasons may be, her silence is as they say deafening. In addition to the country’s long history of ethnic and sectarian conflict, the plight of its Muslim population continues to worsen, with evidence of human trafficking of Burmese Muslim refugees now surfacing. The violence threatens to sp…
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…mese monk asked this American to talk with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi about vipassana (insight) meditation, as she had recently started to rediscover this part of her heritage. This was a time of incredible intellectual ferment for her—you can see it in some of her writings and speeches of the period—when she was attempting to weave together Buddhism, democracy, rights, etc. Hearing about these discussions fascinated me, and while the retreat was sort o…
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…gh the agency of her narco-devotees. Local Religion, Globalization, and La Santa Muerte Although the origins of La Santa Muerte developed locally and unrelated to criminality, there is no doubt that the devotion is changing. Like language, symbols as objects of devotion are constantly in flux. Images that once helped to ease the fear of death have now come to embody that fear on both sides of the border. As savvy marketers, drug cartels have appro…
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