Religion Dispatches
…renia where teachers aren’t sure what they’re supposed to teach,” he said. Spirit of America One of the new amendments places slavery as the third cause of the Civil War, behind states’ rights and sectionalism. Additionally, students must study the inaugural address of Confederate President Jefferson Davis alongside the writings of Abraham Lincoln. McLeroy says that he and other board members weren’t trying to ignore slavery as a cause of the Civi…
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…William talks about crossing the Egyptian desert, he talks about the Holy Spirit. He remembers Pentecost, when, in the Christian Scripture, the first apostles received the guidance of the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem. William, however, didn’t make it to Jerusalem or to a university. After he crossed from Egypt into Israel, border guards took him to immigration prison. Months later, he was handed over to an Israeli employment agency to be a source of…
Read More…o-way street. Christians are going to celebrate Christmas and their higher numbers in society are going to naturally translate into a higher cultural profile for their festivities, but that doesn’t absolve the majority from its responsibility to recognize and strive to accommodate the sensibilities of other, non-Christian communities and traditions. When that responsibility to be open to diversity is systematically neglected, otherwise innocent ex…
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…hishi, which is set in a world where a man named Ginko solves Shinto-esque spirit-related problems So what makes the medium so ideally suited to metaphysical musing? I can think of at least five reasons: 1. There are no physical limitations. You can make cartoon characters grow, shrink, turn into things, toss around the Sun like a football—whatever you want. Any thought experiment that can be visualized can be animated. For instance, in one episod…
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…s of Project 2025 be implemented. During my time as a student at SLBC, from 1998-2000, the school focused on “spiritual warfare” and taught that “homosexual demons” possess individuals and control geographic territories. Every morning before class the entire student body together practiced a militaristic “warfare prayer.” I would sometimes lose my voice after these lengthy sessions of ecstatic prayer deployed (while speaking in tongues), both to c…
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…at which protects the center of human thought and reason—and “sword of the Spirit” are not of course acts of aggression, but words. Hence, likewise, the sword of justice wielded in the Revelation of John (Rev. 19:11-15)—the New Testament book most often cited in violent, apocalyptic Christian fantasies—extends from the mouth of the white-robed representation of the risen Christ. He slays the forces of cosmic evil not with physical aggression, but…
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…gion in China, Japan, Islamic societies, and the United States published in 1970 in his book of essays, Beyond Belief, illustrates that point. In his 1967 essay in Daedalus on “Civil Religion,” Bellah founded a whole new enterprise for religious studies scholars: probing the political significance of religious ideas and the religious significance of political ones. In this case it was Emile Durkheim that Bellah evoked, taking up Durkheim’s notion…
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…he pilgrimage I began in Jesus Died for This? to explore where this global spirit I keep encountering in my travels might be at work in the world. In light of the recent “Ground Zero-mosque” debates, I’m seeking out groups and indviduals who work with Muslims to answer the question posed by the rich, young ruler to Jesus: “Who is My Neighbor?” (See Luke 10:25-37.) Along those lines, I want to keep revisiting my ancestor Roger Williams’ legacy, as…
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…uel’s Pulse: Pulse / cardiovascular movement / on the dance floor / sacred spirit’s thumb and strum / now under cardiac / arrest’s / storm and stress / Pulse’s Emanuel / a metaphysical condition of holy ghostliness on the dance floor / feel the beat / breath’s percussive rhythm / pulsation’s respiration / its aspirational inhalation / its exasperational exhalation / Emanuel’s Pulse, a “pneumatic pact“ In Charleston and now Orlando, last year was t…
Read More…on of hands, and women’s washings and anointings before childbirth. In the 1990s some feminists who restored these elements of Mormon history to our consciousness were excommunicated. When I saw the Dinner Party, I was dismayed to find that the place Chicago set for Hutchinson was designed in colors of grief and mourning, sadness and loss. No doubt, her life was not easy, but I prefer to remember Hutchinson—and others like her—as women who refuse…
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