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Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…r gigs. Rinzler and Burrow’s new meditation studio, MNDFL, is just a block away from Washington Square Park, in one of New York City’s most chic areas. For the price of two entrees at Denny’s (plus a dessert), you can drop in for a 45-minute session that includes a brief introduction, a guided meditation, and a debrief Q&A with one of MNDFL’s 27 teachers. Special deals are available for your first month of visits. “In this branded form, it offers…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…recent demonstrations has focused on the events that have taken place in Lhasa, the capital of the “Tibet Autonomous Region” (TAR), but what is actually happening in Lhasa is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The media has been less successful at covering the protests in the Tibetan ethnic areas of Sichuan, Qinghai, and Gansu provinces on Tibet’s eastern frontier. Protests have even occured in Beijing. Taken together, these demonstrations—mo…

Saving Teens from Obama: When Bible Study Goes Wrong

By Vyckie Garrison

I just returned from watching 2016: Obama’s America, arch-conservative Dinesh D’Souza’s election-year documentary (based on his book The Roots of Obama’s Rage) with my 19-year-old daughter, Chassé. As someone who is now a secular progressive single mom of seven kids, five of whom live at home, I wouldn’t normally choose to spend our family’s perpetually-insufficient income to see this Obama-bashing movie, let alone take along one of my kids. But…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…Day Off, Expelled makes the claim that Academic Science has erected a wall around itself and the theory of evolution, and that anyone, including scientists, who dares to question evolution, who tries to scale that wall, is ostracized by the system. This, according to the movie, is an affront to freedom, a basic right upon which America was built. The movie focuses on five or six folks (all of whom are challenging evolution with the same idea: inte…

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…g. When it is used as a cheap shot—as when pro-Palestinian advocates throw around terms like “Nazi” and “concentration camp”—it is an offense against all those who were murdered over the centuries. Diluting the meaning of the term ‘antisemitism’ is, itself, antisemitic. Second, as I described in a recent post, there is indeed a structural similarity between some of the Occupy movement’s concerns and historical antisemitism. Occupy is, indeed, prot…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…he better evening because of his way with a microphone and his remarkable capacity to modulate his voice (not to mention outing himself as LDS pastor and bishop). But it was Billy Graham’s endorsement, splashed into our faces via an expensive full-page Sunday New York Times ad, that triggered my flat-out recognition: the 94-year-old daddy of all televangelists is laying his bony patriarchal hands upon a fellow preacher who shares his hawk-like pro…

An American Muslim Abroad, Or, Things I Saw in Dubai

By Haroon Moghul

…rox copy job in history—the same firm built both buildings, starting right around the same time. Talk about luxury on the cheap; it’s hard to deny a feeling of similarity. (The tower is to the Burj as a certain toupee is to hair: might the Trump Tower inadvertently mimic an Islamic motif?) The regal twin palm trees in the foreground are the world’s tallest, at some 3,500 feet each. Recently a falling coconut crushed an entire apartment complex,…

Everything You Think You Know About the Dark Ages is Wrong

By Nancy Marie Brown

…tasy world—not an alternate universe after all. For a short period of time around the year 1000, it did exist. In the course of my quest to discover The Scientist Pope, I visited the cathedral of Saint John the Lateran in Rome, where his marble tombstone now hangs on a pillar in the right aisle. Pope Sergius IV, who had been Gerbert’s papal librarian, wrote his epitaph. It reads, in part: “The emperor, Otto III, to whom he was always faithful an…

The Sacred and the Dead: Three Ways to American Beauty

By Aaron K. Kerr

…a question I can’t answer: is there anyone like the Grateful Dead? It’s an amazing, amazing group. I’d like to give credit where credit is due, one of the ushers, before, wrapped it all up, you can use sentences and sentences….someone, someone was talking about music and this usher said, ‘The Grateful Dead aren’t just music they are an environment,’ which is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.” ~Music Promoter Bill Graham, April 29, 1971 One…

Pentecostal Prayer Gangs: New Film Documents Religion in a Brazilian Prison

By Nick Street

…erested in religion in prison in general. I visited Angola Prison in Louisiana and got a tour of the prison. New Orleans Baptist Seminary runs a theology program in the prison—they offer classes and train missionaries that are then sent to other prisons in the state. I asked to speak to one of the seminary members, and the guard introduced me to an inmate named Charlie. Our conversation happened as the guard was looking on, and I realized at that…