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The New York Times Sunday Review has a Mormon Problem

…terization of Mormonism as a “white God’s” plan “for whites” would come as news to millions of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Asia, Latin America, and Africa who have claimed Mormonism as their own. Missionary proselytizing certainly entails its own racial problematics, and one will find in the annals of Mormonism as much racial chauvinism as you’ll find in the history of any other conservative American denomination….

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In the Story of the New Testament We Are the Romans—No Matter Who Wins the Election

…I heard something that changed my whole perspective on the gospels in the New Testament. The biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan was speaking about the narratives of the life of Jesus, so central to that Bible and how people in the church hear them. Then he made this simple observation: “We keep thinking we’re the Jesus people in the story. We’re not. We’re the Romans.” Maybe most people listening thought nothing of the statement. Perhaps they…

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Transgender, Scientologist, “Cult Hero”

…ous or dogmatic reason. His words were valued in the same way as, say, the New Age ‘Law of Attraction’ (formerly known as New Thought): based on their supposedly demonstrable truth, not their religious authority. The devotion of Scientologists to Hubbard may have been weird, slavish, and naïve—but it wasn’t really religious. Or was it? Scientology was intentionally designed to comfort the afflicted, just like religion does. And, just like religion…

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Who’s Afraid of Sacred Soccer?

…uddhists are doing that—nor is it only spirituality vaguely conceptualized—New Agers with crystals, meditation retreats for the professional class. Instead, both old and new media have lit up the religious landscape, illuminating what is still an unconventional, and nebulous, but certainly increasingly capacious, understanding of the sacred in everyday life. Rock and roll can be religious, according to The Hold Steady; a recent Los Angeles Times a…

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The Surprisingly Short History of Popular Yoga

…drawing from Hugh Urban’s work here. He has suggested that tantra and the new age movement intersect where bodily, sexual, and material enjoyment are integrated into spiritual pursuits and that, simultaneously, this integration reflects an intersection between tantra and contemporary consumer culture. In other words, what the New Age movement shares with consumer culture can be found in tantra, the preeminent South Asian model of nondualism. In m…

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The Good Liberal Fear of a Yoga Planet

…rose from a total of 13 in 2000 to a staggering 46 in 2002 (no more recent numbers?) This at a time when, according to Broad’s own numbers, four million people were doing yoga.  Broad offers no quantitative evidence to support Black’s claims, no opposing points of view, and seemingly no conceptual distinction between “yoga” and “pushing yourself too hard during yoga.” In terms of journalism, the article is a failure. The more interesting question,…

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The Collapse of the American Jewish Center

…that conversation. Danny Blinderman, a regional co-chair for J Street U’s New England region, charged in the New York Jewish Week that American Jewish communal leaders have failed to provide “meaningful support” for a two-state solution. “It is time for our leaders to rally around the cause of peace with at least as much fervor as they have around Israel’s latest war,” he wrote. Simone Zimmerman, a former president of the National Student Board o…

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Speaker Mike Johnson to Allow Privately Run National Prayer Breakfast into the Heart of the Capitol

…the politics of individual board members “play no role” in its decisions. News of the new venue came in a Jan. 15 email to members of Congress. Heitkamp and fellow board member former Rep. Randy Hultgren (R-IL) provided members with new details on the event and location. (Hultgren is a longtime Family insider who has met with anti-LGBTQ+ leaders on trips paid for by The Family.) In their email, Heitkamp and Hultgren announced that the NPB Foundat…

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Red White and Blue No Longer

…at they barely made a dent in the wider public consciousness. In addition, New Sanctuary’s focus was mainly on hospitality for immigrants who are here without documents; it did little to help the vastly greater number of immigrant community members today who were born in this country but who are still often treated as though they are here illegally. Here’s a proposition: if breaking the grip of plantation capitalism and its political enablers requ…

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“Charity saved the day… [but] charity isn’t enough”: Kate Bowler on This New Era

…at is one of the biggest transformations that has occurred for you in this new era? My stage four cancer diagnosis came at the same time as this election. Everyone I knew was experiencing a lot of hopelessness. The lack of hope almost has an apocalyptic quality to it, and I thought a lot about that because I’m just trying to figure out the nature of hope for me if it doesn’t mean certainty. In this season of intense hopelessness, our personal conn…

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