Religion Dispatches
…umbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it…
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…y, impermanence, interdependence, and finitude of embodied life. Is there anything you had to leave out? My publisher allowed me to go a few thousand words over their original word limit, but I still had to cut a number of compelling stories of people who have struggled with body shame because of internalized cultural/religious norms and narratives about weight, disability, chronic pain or illness. I also had to omit some of my analyses of example…
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…lculations, one-third of evangelicals don’t vote, and when you factor this number against the number of votes needed to tip battleground states like Pennsylvania, there’s not much convincing that needs to be done to turn the election for Trump. It might seem like a small affair, until you realize that JD Vance was one of the speakers at the Courage Tour event in Pennsylvania. Predictably, demonic rhetoric underlies a lot of the Tour. From what I’v…
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…oday. No one is going to judge you.” Recent studies suggest that while the number of young Americans who consider themselves religious or spiritual remains roughly constant, their spiritual practices are changing. They are more likely than their parents to consider themselves unaffiliated with any particular practice, or the version of the religion they practice boils down to injunctions to a vague sense of morality, fairness, and happiness, what…
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…roup of Birmingham college students who had been persuaded by one of their number that this was worth the wait. It was. It is hard to describe the experience of standing in the second row of a rock concert, untold numbers at your back, without sounding trite. In a world in which it is possible to conduct nearly all communication via one machine or another, to travel from one climate-controlled setting to the next without exchanging so much as a mo…
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…Pews: Stories of Leaving the Church Chrissy Stroop and Lauren O’Neal Epiphany Publishing November 29, 2019 What many of these articles and books share in common is a sense of confusion or despair. The primary question they ask is often framed in the same way: people are leaving organized religion, so what can churches do to get them back? or, if it’s an election year, how will this religious disaffiliation affect their vote? Rarely do those who st…
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…ective resistance. According to the website of the athleisure apparel company Spiritual Gangster, “We exercise love as the most powerful form of activism.” The company donates an unspecified percentage of every sale to provide food for those living in poverty. This is generous, but it does not quite qualify as “activism,” since there does not appear to be any effort to actually transform the systems (ideological, behavioral or political) that prod…
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…oneness and connection with universal consciousness.” These claims echo many critiques of commercial yoga that rest on the assumption that yoga has a single, authentic origin point and purpose. Yoga’s origins are often located in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, in which the author prescribes eight limbs or stages the practitioner must master in order to achieve the aim of yoga, stillness of the mind. In popular discourses, yoga’s aim in the Yoga Sutras…
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…eration of her situation and knows exactly what she is doing; a woman in many cases who doesn’t feel the need to consult anyone. In other words, a moral agent. Without such empathy, Rick Warren’s statements about abortion have a helicopter feel to them—they hover over the complexities of a woman’s life, but never land. And without appreciating those complexities, neither understanding nor compassion is possible. However broad, however generous you…
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…he presidential palace, have also provoked popular anger because of what many perceive to be their brazen stonewalling tactics, especially Executive Order 464, which prohibits any cabinet officials from testifying before the Senate without the president’s permission. The case took a dramatic turn in early February when the Senate could not locate Lozada, who was due to begin giving his testimony. A few days later, Lozada resurfaced at De La Salle…
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