Religion Dispatches
…tes, 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 urgency,” writes Virgin executive Ron Faris, covering SoulCycle for the Harvard Business Review. “It’s irrational commerce at its finest.” In some ways, SoulCycle looks like a prosperity gospel church for secular coastal elites. Preachers in the prosperity gosp…
Read MoreSpecial Guests, a booking service that sends out daily press releases to reporters, producers, and radio shows, and which earlier this week described the proposed Park51 project as “Obamosque,” is today touting a Time magazine poll showing one quarter of Americans apparently believe President Obama is a Muslim. (A Pew poll out today shows that figure at 19%). Why do that many Americans believe that? Could it be the use of terms like “Obamosque?”…
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…beat down of Duanna Johnson, an African American transwoman, in a Memphis booking room that was captured on a surveillance video. “I’d be stupid not to go packing now.” Williams lives in Oakland, just outside of San Francisco, and he’s going to check out the San Francisco chapter of Pink Pistols. As a national organization that encourages lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender to arm themselves to prevent hate crimes the Pink Pistols are also a s…
Read More…lier post on some of the spins Special Guest is promoting here. Today, the booking site is promoting Ted Shoebat, who says that being an atheist leads one to commit mass murder. “It’s actually very simple,” Shoebat was quoted in Special Guest’s promotion, “When God is not in your life, evil will seek to fill the void.” And who is Shoebat? As Sarah wrote in a post in August: …(He) is the son of “ex-terrorist” Walid Shoebat, an over-exposed figure i…
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…r people’s children, Walters appears far more concerned with grabbing microphones and hopping in front of the nearest television camera than actually providing students with a quality education. His staunchest supporters are turning on him because he has simply failed to do his job, avoiding any meetings with teachers and administrators, and apparently barricading himself behind locked doors and armed guards. Walters is so extreme that 17 state le…
Read More…r her Israel trip, as it has done for other presidential hopefuls, instead booking it through a Christian tour agency. He thinks, perhaps, that Palin is miffed that he and other RJC board members have been critical of her, but that she’s unwise to rebuff them because they could be so helpful to her. But this is characteristically Palin behavior — with or without the criticism. She is, for example, the only GOP aspirant who has never spoken at the…
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…ded social resource scarcity for those most in need. What this large-scale flight of social resources left in its wake was not an urban demographic characterized by upward mobility but by severe poverty and social isolation. Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of persons living in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of 40 percent or higher grew from 7.8 to 15.8 percent for blacks and from 7.0 to 9.5 percent for Hispanics, and by 2010 the proportio…
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…e story of a small group coming to grips with a mass cultural trauma. As a number of notable sociologists put forth in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004), society, to put it simply, can experience trauma like an individual can. As with the individual, there are a few things that make a society more vulnerable to trauma. “A society emerging from a major war, suffering from diminished economic r…
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…ere not companionship-based. They were economic arrangements. Okay, that’s number 1. Number 2, let’s say that your wife didn’t provide you with a male offspring. A man could take another wife and another wife and another wife until one of them did. This is the “sanctity of marriage” that is being protected. Are you kidding me? Wow. Okay, so that’s Old Testament. Then along comes Jesus. Well for those of us who follow Jesus, I always like to point…
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…nes, known to all Americans and read by many—especially in airports. On my flight to Istanbul, Time was available in the first airport lounge, Newsweek in the second. Against a backdrop of shouting mobs, smoke and fire, Time’s headline reads: THE AGENTS OF OUTRAGE An embassy attacked. Diplomats murdered. The new calculus of violence against America. Published on September 13, its author is Bobby Ghosh, senior editor for Time International. Then, f…
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