Religion Dispatches
…dless 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 brand religion is all about: stoking emotion with a combination of scarcity and urgenc…
Read More…y now), Gustavo Gutierrez, Marcus Borg, James Cone, Sallie McFague, or any number of other thinkers and theologians that Douthat does not recognize. The only people who want to bring back Niebuhr are conservatives. (I’m an admitted fanboy, but that’s about coming from the same church background as Niebuhr as much as anything.) And that doesn’t even get to the worst of it. Douthat misunderstands Francis’ amazing, charismatic realignment of Catholic…
Read More…on-Muslims to support those ideals while transcending easy stereotypes and cheap fear-mongering. We should therefore pause in our reactions and ask ourselves; perhaps an Islamic revolution in Egypt is not de facto a bad thing. Finally, I’m reminded of Karen Armstrong’s description of the historical mission Muslims are tasked with: “In Islam, Muslims have looked for God in history. Their sacred scripture, the Quran, gave them a historical missio…
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…hat. I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that “some” adds up to a significant number. Not, at least, on the grounds of Novavax’s supposed selling point. To be fair, that’s not all there is to the piece. In fact, the question about Novavax’s allure reads like a wrapper for a bigger narrative about anti-vaxx activism merging with right-wing Christian nationalism. There’s an interesting story to be told there, and you should follow all the links in Jenk…
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…ed that she had a disabled son. Here and there, Penance hurts. Between the cheap jokes and bourgeois self-loathing are murmurs worth hearing, if only as microfiction. Likewise, the app’s agnosticism facilitates a lucid tableau of spontaneous popular theology. Of the 24 confessions, only one references God as an active third party, two command the Sinner to forgive themselves, and three confessors speak in the first person as God. “God forgive me,”…
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…ood from as much of the world as possible, in land, natural resources, and cheap labor. What does it mean to be born in a place that measures your value, your worth, your very life by the calculus of possession? That calculus extends through time to us from those founding greed-filled moments invading our waking consciousness and driving us forward in a strange confession. We believe in competition born of the desire to possess. We believe in stri…
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…te the backstory there. Haley’s use of the phrase “Catholic ghetto” is not cheap hyperbole, if you consider the history of Catholics in the United States. The US Catholic hospital system grew up in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; largely under the care of women’s religious orders, and largely to serve the poor. (Read about a few of the women who helped build Catholic health care.) The surrounding cultural landscape could be pr…
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…on to overshadow the long shadow of apartheid. President Zuma sees 2010 as South Africa’s most significant year since 1994, the year apartheid ended. This could be the case. A tilted economy remains in South Africa (as in the entire globalized economy), setting in unreasonable and unnecessary suffering, but hope remains. These are Mandela’s children. A new cultural memory is building to replace the old. This could be the time for the beautiful gam…
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…a broadcast program, accused mainline churches of supporting terrorists in South Africa—in the struggle in Zimbabwe against the white minority, and against the apartheid government of South Africa. The mainline churches supported the people trying to overthrow these immoral regimes. The IRD said that they were supporting terrorists in Africa, so they didn’t have an interest in Africa then. [The mainline churches] managed to help Africans get their…
Read More…ns. (Hat tip to Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars.): Wow! The South Dakota legislature has declared, by majority vote, that the ancient pseudoscience of astrology “can effect world weather”! Astrology, of course, is a superstitious belief that the movements of stars and planets can affect our daily lives here on Earth, a belief that has no basis in science. Some people—including, apparently, the South Dakota legislature—still take it…
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