Religion Dispatches
…ld soon be feeling the need to leave her home country. Not surprisingly, a number of Western women felt moved to show their support for Amina. An international movement called Femen staged bare-breasted protests in European cities, in which the writings on their chests echoed Amina’s, along with “Freedom for women” and “Fuck your morals.” (Be warned: photos contain nudity and strong language.) But Femen did not have the last word. Almost immediat…
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…t the “Aerobics Center,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not c…
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…s” conundrum Parallel to the diaconal growth is the steady increase in the number of women engaged in ministries of all sorts. Whether in campus ministry or prison work, in parishes where they now outnumber priests in the U.S., in religious communities or religious education, women around the world do an increasingly large share of the Roman Catholic Church’s ministry without being ordained or having decision-making power. No wonder it occurred to…
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…howing overwhelming public support. United Kingdom: Elections bring record number of gay MPs, Tory coalition with anti-gay DUP Voters in Britain’s parliamentary elections not only denied Theresa May’s Conservative Party a majority; they also elected 45 gay MP’s to the House of Commons, where they make up 7 percent of seats, which Pink News says is the world’s highest. Nineteen are Conservatives. May is drawing criticism for making an alliance with…
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…acterization of the spiritual-but-not-religious person is of someone a bit flighty and unserious. The spirituality is a pastiche of confused and conflicting ideas. The seeker is typically thought of as embracing a mishmash of conflicting ideas—Catholicism and reincarnation, Buddhism and crystals, kitschy angels and dreamcatchers—which, if taken seriously as ideas, would not seem to fit together. For Montgomery, however, joining spiritual individua…
Read More…C.S. Lewis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Francis Schaffer, and Rick Warren. Her influence is well noted in her obituary by Kate Shellnutt at Christianity Today. Through Elliot’s book, evangelicals latched on to the deaths of these five young men, and their story became a galvanizing force for keeping the faith, and perhaps for inspiration to get up and go. Gates of Splendor continues to be evoked in books, songs, and videos (see here and here). For many…
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…hetoric about yoga that thrives on nostalgia while also betraying a modern flavor of capitalism, all while profiting off of a fear of lost cultural norms tied to various forms of xenophobia, nationalism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, and homophobia. Modi works closely with a number of allies to wed yoga to right-wing causes. Yogi Adityanath (Hindu nationalist and chief minister of Uttar Pradesh) responded to some Muslim protests of Modi’s Internationa…
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…call for racial justice in his community as “ideological” rather than as reflecting the lived experiences of his PoC sangha members. Why did he not include any of the first-person reports by Triratna members of color who have experienced racism within and beyond white dominant Triratna spaces? In fact, in a commonly employed reactionary reverse victim strategy, the only identity group he does name as vulnerable in Triratna are conservatives. One a…
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…out their various insights inside an occult context, in a social world overflowing with spirits and magic, and how the weirdness of that cultural milieu generated so much normativity. Is there anything you had to leave out? There is a lot I had to leave out. I tend to overwrite, and the first draft was massive and I had to cut a lot. So I ended up eliminating rough chapters on French social theory, American philosophy, Japanese accounts of Western…
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…them. One morning early on in my Nepalese sojourn, I heard the distinctly flat-accented voices of men from the American Midwest waft up from the street through an open window in my second-floor hotel room. One of the voices belonged to Heuertz, but the others I didn’t recognize. A few moments later, I encountered three big middle-aged guys from Wisconsin with rucksacks strapped to their backs, dressed like a cross between trekkers and constructio…
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