Religion Dispatches
…f their faith in the public square. The counterfeit here is the collective spirit, the shared attitude they exhibit together (like a church). That collective spirit has very little to do with the worship of a marginalized Jew, named Jesus, who came to free the poor and oppressed. This counterfeit Christian community worships power, desires control, and imagines the world revolving around self-sufficient men (and a few women). I call it “Mad Man Re…
Read More…he Ecstasy, the Laundry: If we expect community relationships to be ideal, spiritual, friendly, and enlightened, we are seeking what we can’t even expect of our own minds. To want the company of others without suffering is unrealistic. But if we avoid close relationships, we will also suffer. In a wise spiritual community we acknowledge our difficulties and choose to help one another anyway. Sometimes we will be the one to carry the blessings of s…
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…forces of globalization that effect societies virtually everywhere on the planet. A recent form of global religion—the emergence of strident religious politics—is related to the worldwide crisis of the nation-state and is a defensive response to the era of global interaction. Bellah shows us that this has happened before, at important moments earlier in history, when global social changes have created religious responses on a virtually global sca…
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…national ideal “which would lead to a revitalization of the revolutionary spirit of the young republic, so that Americans would once again attract the hope and love of its citizens”? Bellah is invested, even piously so, in American civil religion, and feels called to rally us in its behalf. Habits of the Heart simply intensifies the image of Bellah’s pastoral concern for the moral health of the republic, threatened as it is by impoverishing indiv…
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…tion instead of a church, mosque or schul, the links between understanding spirituality as the work of the spirit, or of the soul, become less and less meaningful. And as traditions rooted in Asian culture and tradition are stripped of their religious roots and are co-opted as one-size-fits-all “spirituality,” the term itself is so vague as to be nearly useless. Seen in this light, the designation “spiritual but not religious” does not mean much o…
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…that U.S. Catholics need to act on their faith and be on guard against “a spirit of adulation bordering on servility” that exists towards the Obama Administration. Rest assured Archbishop Chaput, that those of us who want change the church will not have a spirit of adulation towards your new administration in Philadelphia. As I have said before, and will say again, the Catholic Church in its present iteration is a broken, flawed, lawless instit…
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…n, and Audre Lorde, each of whom had prior track records of engaging black spiritual traditions in their work. Where Larry Neal’s afterword to Black Fire advocated a spiritual integrity styled after the male preacher, Toni Cade Bambara called attention to the shortcomings of that model. Her own essay in the volume, “On the Issue of Roles,” took up the topic of religion both to illustrate the problem and propose some provisional alternatives. In do…
Read More…pirit with him at all times, through prayer and scripture study as well as spiritual sacrifice and moderation. John Behn, an LDS father of a gay son—Affirmation’s vice-president—related the words he heard God speak to him when his son came out: “Your son is a part of you, and you are a part of your son, and nothing should tear you apart. Go on this journey together.” On Sunday morning, when I joined the members of Affirmation in the Kirtland Templ…
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…onference with an ebullient welcome. Amid the ceremony’s invocation of a “Spirit of Unity,” evocation of ancestors, and call for a commitment to work together, Ghanaian theologian Elizabeth Amoah lamented some Africans’ roles in capturing and trading other Africans into enslavement and expressed hope for possibilities of the meeting. Other program highlights included lectures by Oduyoye and Jamaican American theologian Dianne Stewart Diakitè, a “…
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…o change one’s biological sexual identity are all symptomatic of a broader spiritual disorder that threatens the family, the government, and the church.” 26% of members believe homosexuality should be accepted by society. Presbyterian Church USA (Mainline Protestant) Members (as of 2010): 2,675,873 As of June, 2014 the Book of Order now reads that marriage is defined as a covenant “between two people, traditionally between a man and a woman.” In…
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