Religion Dispatches
…nister. Michaelson, in his late thirties, is a freelance teacher of Jewish spirituality, known particularly as the leader of Nehirim, an organization fostering spiritual consciousness among GLBT Jews. A poet and prolific essayist, he is also co-founder of the literary journal Zeek, and a regular voice in the Jewish press (and lately the Huffington Post), whose writing challenges the ethnic and mythological components of Jewish identity for the sak…
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…t bikes,” says Theo Angell, a 41-year-old artist who joined in the December 19 ride. “Bikes pose no threat to anyone.” He concluded that the lanes were removed “for basically religious reasons.” Scratch an apparently religious reason, however, and there is often something more than sheer dogma beneath the surface. The “plague of the artists” prayer, for instance, is as much a reaction to Williamsburg’s skyrocketing rents as to invading interlopers…
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…lot of it will be empty blather, but we can hope that at least some of America’s pastors will help us think about what showing good will toward all of God’s children actually requires—and (speaking of angels) about how the better angels of our nature can actually be awakened. In that spirit, we and those preachers might well consider the import of this passage from a lovely prayer by Howard Thurman: “Give me the listening ear. I seek this day the…
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…the Earth.” The cracker barrel-styled reading of Acts—and of I Corinthians 13 at the prayer meeting the week before where 150 people reportedly swarmed his house—are emblematic of Pastor Ted’s uncanny, Zelig-like talent for reflecting the emerging Christian Right zeitgeist of the moment. In the mid-1980s, the so-called Charismatic and Pentecostal “shift in gravity” from the Deep South westward had much less to do with a random vision to build a c…
Read More…gated in the past tense, if it isn’t already. When the Feds raided last May 12th, they arrested close to four hundred illegal immigrants. More upsetting were the subsequent revelations that these workers had been laboring in illegally dangerous conditions, that some were underage, and that some claimed to have been subjected to physical and sexual abuse. This came on top of the allegations of animal mistreatment, environmental pollution, and anti-…
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…interested in empirically questioning a Christian’s experience of the Holy Spirit. But there were still many obstacles to navigate regarding the metaphysical claims of vampires. Of particular controversy was the existence of subtle energy or “psi,” which many vampires claim to feed on. Some of the vampires were quick to point out that I could not really understand their life-world if I dismissed the existence of subtle energy. By contrast, fellow…
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…n beings can become like God, who is also married and who is literally our spiritual father in heaven: with his many wives, he not only created but procreated the spirit of every person born physically onto this Earth. Proving oneself worthy of the right to do the same thing in another corner of the universe is, in Mormon belief, the goal and purpose of our mortal existence. The film argues that because gay people cannot procreate on their own, th…
Read More…roof for divine realities. Was not the telegraph, for example, a herald of spiritualist communication? The Society of Psychical Research, on both sides of the Atlantic, was enamored with the notion that the new auditory technologies could well yield spiritual dividends. When the telephone appeared on the scene, some in the SPR threw themselves behind a new contraption called the “psycho-phone” through which the inventors claimed to be hearing the…
Read More…nections and theological applications.” Detweiler, co-director of the Reel Spirituality Institute and associate professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary, “uses the IMDb, the wildly popular Internet Movie Database, to select today’s most influential contemporary films. Into the Dark dissects the theology of everyday life, exploring the work of the Spirit of God in creation and redemption to discuss “general revelation” throu…
Read More…on and her small town roots is the way they seem to merge, the territorial spiritual warfare of her churches phrased in secular terms through her channeling of Pegler. “Territorial spiritual warfare” is the idea, embraced by Palin’s pastors, that entire cities can be possessed by demons. Small towns, too, theoretically, but that’s not usually how it works. The first time I encountered it was at Ted Haggard’s New Life Church, in Colorado Springs. W…
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