Religion Dispatches
…arified flesh, its rotund, risqué, and otherwise resolute features. That many major US film critics (Ebert, Turan, Hoberman, Scott, et al.) praised Rourke’s performance and ignored the religious dimensions shows how little, again, the news media has any clue about religion, except when something like Mel Gibson’s Passion is stapled to their foreheads. Stranger still, even reviews published in explicitly religious venues—Christianity Today, Hollywo…
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…ty is essential to SoulCycle’s business model. The classes may be open to anyone “regardless of their…profession,” but I somehow doubt that sanitation workers outnumber investment bankers in SoulCycle studios (one of which is across the street from the Goldman Sachs headquarters in Tribeca). Classes with popular instructors sell out in minutes, and patrons can pay upwards of $70 per class in order to get priority booking. “Ultimately, this is what…
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…eview, philosopher Thomas Nagel chides Brooks for believing and endorsing any old piece of data presented by a cognitive scientist, “however idiotic.” And, so, it seems important (to me) to underscore the extent to which Brooks is echoing and imitating the destiny-shaping ambitions of old school humanists like Rousseau. Indeed, a related article that Brooks recently penned for The New Yorker suggests that his synthesis of scientific research and f…
Read More…“Redeem the times! The times are inexpressibly evil. Christians pay conscious, indeed religious tribute, to Caesar and Mars . . . And yet, and yet, the times are inexhaustibly good, solaced by the courage and hope of many.” Cynicism is understandable, and despair more so. But instead of siding with cheap, whitewashed nostalgia, let us note that certain moments in the past remind us of the future that may yet still be achieved….
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…y import, sacrilege, faith and ideology, which is faith’s steely cousin. A number of years ago, I was chatting with the theologian Walter Brueggemann’s then-wife Mary on a Sunday morning. She told me she’d been bemoaning some bit of racial egregiousness or another to her husband, and asked him why he thought people had to be this way. “There are two kinds of people in the world,” he replied. “Those who don’t see an order to the universe, and those…
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…various wedding parties were unperplexed by the protesters offering testimony against an economic system that excludes far too many Americans from the fullness of even the most modest constructions of “domestic bliss.” “That cat’s a f**king loser,” offered one groomsman by way of commentary, as Tom, a mechanic from East St. Louis, who declined to give his last name, talked about his inability to earn a living wage despite working 60 hours a week….
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…n Israel with 6-7 children—think FLDS). Committed to study and devotion, many men do not work, or work part-time, meaning they have little financial means. Yet in many cases they live middle-class lives that seem incommensurate with their incomes. This is due in part to a complex network of Haredi charities and Israeli government subsidies for large families. The solution: develop Haredi communities in the territories where housing is cheap (throu…
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…irectly from the Republican playbook. This is the canard, unsubstantiated anywhere, that relieving student debt represents a regressive upward redistribution of wealth, with uncredentialed working people subsidizing the college-educated elite. Jamelle Bouie, writing in the Times, had this to say about the “it’s regressive” smear: The idea that student loan relief is a handout to a small minority of affluent college graduates is simply a myth. But…
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…er border security, we forget that such measures have grossly inflated the number of undocumented immigrants residing in the US. Half of these used to return to Mexico annually, but researchers now estimate that only one-fourth do so today; stricter border enforcement measures since 1994 have staunched the cyclical flow of the return home of millions. The crisis of 12 million “illegal” immigrants is one of our own creation. The missing clergy coul…
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…ecosystem by Delta and Omicron (to say nothing of “Omicron 2”). Is there anything to recommend this shot, other than how it was developed? If not, it seems like a pretty cheap tout. Moreover, touting the drug’s fetal-cell-free origins potentially undermines the adoption of rival medications by keeping alive the far-fetched idea that to use them is to be somehow complicit in abortion. That’s a big enough problem these days, but it could be even wo…
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