Religion Dispatches
…practitioners of science worship. Is there room in Ultra Spirituality for scientific discoveries? Absolutely not. In fact, science is the enemy of true Ultra Spiritual growth. I’m personally working on techniques to disengage my attachment to gravity. The more influenced you are by gravity the more stuck in your religion of science you are, therefore the less ultra spiritual you are. How does an Ultra Spiritual guru overcome gravity? The power of…
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…David loved Jonathan “as his own soul,” but we don’t find their wedding in scripture. Instead, we get from scripture only David’s Amoris Laetitia—his joy of love. In the second chapter, Pope Francis notes that families have changed. Spouses now share more responsibilities. He hits on his oft-repeated belief that in a marriage personalism is good, but individualism is bad. Also, he notes but offers no explanation for the decreasing number of marria…
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…fulness. The studio was opened by a longtime editor at Glamour, Suze Yalof Schwartz. In a phone interview, Yalof Schwartz said that she decided to open the studio when she couldn’t easily find a place to learn meditation. I asked Yalof Schwartz how Unplug differed from the dozens of Buddhist centers that immigrants and hippies have sprinkled across the hills of Southern California. “Meditation is a science,” she replied. “It’s literally build[ing]…
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…movement in the United States, you may think of Ferguson. You may think of Baltimore. You may think of the now-iconic image of Howard University students, hands up in the air, or statements like “I Can’t Breathe.” It may be the list of hashtagged names that grows larger every 28 hours. But something else has stood out to me. Images of a white-clad black woman burning sage across a militarized police line. Altars using sacred images and symbols fro…
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…id, scorning his activist passion even while they admired his theology and scholarship. Because I discovered I was not alone, because there were others for me to meet upon my journey, my journey became possible. As we discovered each other, we granted each other the truths of our own different stories, ultimately the truth that we could share a journey of many different journeys. We discovered how astonishingly rich were the Judaisms—plural—we had…
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…is a window into the American soul, then that window looks into the public school science classroom. This is where the odd, vituperative dance of religion and science has played out ever since the Scopes Trial in Tennessee (Expelled shifts the dance location only slightly into the halls of academe). And this is where the failure of science education has occurred. Second, Expelled argues to bring intelligent design and, by implication, other ways o…
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…I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very little are not the abusers of cheap grace, but that others in well-feathered nests who are preaching sacrifice might be in real trouble on the cheap grace front. Obama cannot and should not condemn those in the electorate who buy into Romney’s “there will be showers of blessing” message, but he probably does …
Read More…Barack Obama. Antisemitism is a serious, real thing. When it is used as a cheap shot—as when pro-Palestinian advocates throw around terms like “Nazi” and “concentration camp”—it is an offense against all those who were murdered over the centuries. Diluting the meaning of the term ‘antisemitism’ is, itself, antisemitic. Second, as I described in a recent post, there is indeed a structural similarity between some of the Occupy movement’s concerns a…
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…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…
Read More…ce at winning, given the state’s Democratic leanings and promising polling numbers. O’Malley said that expansive religious freedom language in the law was important to its passage and in keeping with the traditions of the state of Maryland. The referendum language makes clear that the law protects clergy from having to perform any ceremony that violates their beliefs, guarantees each faith control over its marriage doctrine, and “provides that rel…
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