Religion Dispatches
…museum escape the fiction of its own secularity and thereby rediscover its spiritual roots, its spiritual task? It is telling that Sweeney’s bold vision was not entirely successful. He resigned from the Guggenheim when Harry Frank Guggenheim encouraged him to promote “a more popular educational approach.” And he was later asked to step down from his post at the Houston Museum when his “innovative if controversial curatorial approach came up agains…
Read More…s right now. For one thing, I really did take this as a good thing, in the spirit of the early warning system. Since the time my friend said, you have to be invited by Allah to make the hajj; I have been in various states of preparation. I’ve been preparing to receive the invitation, preparing to recognize it when it is given, and preparing to accept it. I considered it a mandate to do whatever was necessary to put me in the right place for it all…
Read More
…effect? It was with this ideas in mind that numerous studies throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s sought to determine whether religious practices such as prayer were healing forces whose efficacy could be verified through clinical trials and modern science. But, in 2006, the largest and most ambitious prayer study to date (led by the cardiologist Herbert Benson) indicated that patients who were prayed for (and were told about it, giving th…
Read More
…enly realms, but in the traditional depiction of them, they are not vague “spiritual” places like the amorphous afterlife of Hereafter but actual places, albeit very different from any we usually know. Enter the Void is about the supernatural, but in a way it’s entirely naturalistic. The closest thing Hereafter presents as an authority figure, a Swiss hospice worker, says that she was once a skeptic, but was convinced over twenty years of working…
Read More…ing whatsoever is to be added to this, whether by “new revelations” of the Spirit or by the traditions of man.” [emphasis in the original] Certainly homeschoolers are not monolithic; in fact the earliest years of the movement were dominated by lefties who rejected public education for its stifling regimentation, favoring what they often referred to as unschooling. But by the beginning of the twenty-first century homeschooling has become an industr…
Read More…ack into serfdom, unemployment benefits expired, and in a bid to bring the spirit of peace and generosity back to Christmas, Republicans threatened to filibuster the START treaty until tax cuts for the upper 2% of wealthy Americans were made permanent. Oh, and like a maraschino cherry high atop a lollapalooza of suck, we find out from Wikileaks that the Obama administration—with GOP help—basically has quashed the investigation into torture by slow…
Read More…ice-weekly practitioner of Bikram Yoga, the infamous 26-posture, 90-minute, 105-degree brand of hot yoga introduced to America and copyrighted by the eponymous Bikram Choudhury. Copyrighted? Yes, Bikram copyrighted his sequence of 26 postures, much to the chagrin of critics who say you can’t own sacred knowledge. But in the legal filing to copyright yoga, Bikram’s attorneys characterized yoga not as a religion but as something akin to a dance rout…
Read More
…ural) is that which curbs what we today might call “nature” in the name of spiritual discipline. Yes, Paul replaces physical circumcision with spiritual, but in doing so he creates a far more insidious apparatus of control. This is a nature of anti-nature. Ironic, then, that many of today’s anti-gay voices call homosexuality “unnatural” in a pseudo-scientific sense. They are wrong; Paul is right. Homosexuality is entirely too natural, found in ove…
Read More…who bought and sold lives in mathematical equations without faces. But the spirit was gone; Rove was in disgrace, Cheney was reduced to playing the snarling bogeyman on occasion. Nothing new happened, thanks be to God. And in 2008, I, like so many others, dared to hope. Not in some supposed new Chosen One—that Obama was some messianic figure was an idea rooted only in the firm soil of authoritarian minds opposed to his election—but we hoped that w…
Read More
…ng of a folk hero for his courage and was widely believed to have enormous spiritual powers. He appeared in advertisements for a popular brand of sports drink together with nationally known athletes. The advertisements suggested a relationship between the athletes’ physical prowess and Mbah Marijan’s spiritual power. I met Mbah Marijan only once, less than two months ago. He was a very deeply religious man in a very Javanese way. He was a pious Mu…
Read More