Religion Dispatches
…ester NY, who lost his daughter Jean, a flight attendant on board American Airlines Flight 11. Mr. Roger said he hoped the pope would say prayers for the place, for the people, and for his daughter Jean. Praying at a unlighted candle next to the prie-dieu Pope Benedict XVI used on his visit, the Pope offered those prayers silently while looking at the south pool of the memorial. The 9/11 site has become not just a memorial or a museum—it is a pilg…
Read More
…he black aesthetic of the 1960s) as the title. While I ended up borrowing “Spirit in the Dark” from Aretha, I think “That Spirit Is Black” would have worked just as well, and I did at least use Stewart’s phrase as the title for chapter six. How do you feel about the cover? I’m very proud to say that the artwork for the cover was a collaboration between Oxford’s design team and my wife, who used charcoal on paper to make the image onto which [Oxfor…
Read More
…ay village.” An estimated 250,000 visitors descend on Taung Pyone Nat Pwe (Spirit Festival), the largest of its kind in Burma’s calendar. Nats are spirits which have existed alongside Burmese Buddhist culture since the 11th century. Worshipped across the country, there are 37 in total and they have a little more cheek – and more vices – than the Buddhas. Most nats, so tradition goes, have met a violent death, and when they revisit earth, they must…
Read More
…bow flags, and life-size cutouts of Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell beckon customers to the hair salon that Schenck and Loyd run on the ground floor. How have the men fared in the two decades since they moved to Arkansas from New York? “We haven’t been shot at in two, maybe three years,” says Schenck, who was working as a bar-back in the Stonewall Inn on the day of the riots in 1969. “For our first pride parade, we had over 1,800 protesters and ov…
Read More
…ass politicization skip right on to Noah’s Ark, which has been pulled into service for both environmentalist and anti-climate change causes. Maybe that’s the next book… Nobody even raised the issue when the U.S. invaded Iraq! Or did they? Actually, there were lots of mentions of the Garden of Eden during the early years of the Iraq War. It would come up as a mournful, ironic sidenote in otherwise brutally depressing reporting. “This place, which i…
Read More…al Society of America, recently wrote a piece distributed by Religion News Service titled “Don’t play politics with Communion.” O’Brien and Cahill wrote about two Catholic Obama endorsers Kansas Gov. Sebelius and Douglas W. Kmiec, an esteemed constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University, who were “recent targets of clergy who use Communion as a political weapon and effectively blacklist respected Catholic leaders.” It remains to be see…
Read More
…what is raised is imperishable… It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.” Generations of Christians have tried to figure out what that “spiritual body” means. I am reminded of a conversation with Owen Gingerich, a Christian believer who is also an astrophysicist at Harvard. He puts the conundrum this way: Human bodies are characterized by change, and heaven, by tradition, is characterized by changelessness. How does that work? Ho…
Read More
…e and was organized via social media? It’s definitely not the first Jewish service to take place at a protest, but a Kol Nidre service at an economic protest organized over Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook? Yes. Quite likely a first. It’s also super exciting to see such an incredible response. Kol Nidre is the evening service of the holiest Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur. These Aramaic words mean “all vows,” and in the Kol Nidre service the cantor recite…
Read More
…ken over by evil spirits. I can’t emphasize enough how rapidly the idea of Spiritual Warfare is growing. Trump’s spiritual advisor, Paula White Cain, was mocked for asking for termination of ‘all Satanic pregnancies’ in the 2020 election. People thought she was mad. No, she was speaking to a huge audience, both in America and overseas! What are some popular misconceptions about Pentecostalism and its relationship to evangelicalism in America? Many…
Read More
…ogmatic about terms.) Many assume that the exclusion of other animals from spiritual things, or spiritual realities, is simply par for the course in monotheistic religious traditions. And yet, creaturely experience itself is derived from the basic categories of monotheistic theology—it is a form of experience that originates in a cosmology dominated by a creating creator and populated by its creatures. Granted, within monotheistic thought there is…
Read More