Religion Dispatches
…uddhists are doing that—nor is it only spirituality vaguely conceptualized—New Agers with crystals, meditation retreats for the professional class. Instead, both old and new media have lit up the religious landscape, illuminating what is still an unconventional, and nebulous, but certainly increasingly capacious, understanding of the sacred in everyday life. Rock and roll can be religious, according to The Hold Steady; a recent Los Angeles Times a…
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…ny of FDR’s pro-worker initiatives, and the right’s focus shifted from the New Deal to the New World Order. Conservative organizations still roiled local waters. In the 1950s, populist movements fought secular humanism in California’s public schools, and in the 1960s, millions mobilized around Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. By the late 1970s, strong grassroots groups in California, the Ozarks, the Midwest, and the South came together in…
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…el, AwakenWithJP, where he’s developed a following for his wry send-ups of New Age culture via his alter ego “Ultra Spiritual” JP Sears, a kind of Stephen Colbert for the New Age set. Dressed in a purple T-shirt and pale green headband, with a flower tucked into his chest-length red hair. Ultra Spiritual JP delivers earnest, convoluted advice on everything from vegetarianism to ayahuasca to the psychology of the selfie, all in pitch-perfect deadpa…
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…in August 2011) to repeal the new ordination policies and revert to the discriminatory policies of the past. And here I can only say that those Lutherans considering such a plan of attack might be better served to leave the ELCA and join the new NALC, allowing the ELCA to pursue its mission to manifest God’s grace and Christ’s love in the world, with no exceptions….
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…e statues were less about honoring the Civil War dead than they were about promoting 20th century white supremacy). In some ways, it’s not all that different from the ideas that sold people on the first Crusade back in the 11th century. And it’s not all that different from the story we tell ourselves today, every time we enter another country for their “own good.” Sure, we went into Iraq on the basis of false information about WMDs. But in the rhe…
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…e imagined than real. And yet, despite there being some expected variation between Celtic and the rest of Europe’s Christianity, there’s no substantial theological difference between the Roman Catholic Church of the period and its Irish, Scottish, and Welsh believers. Until the Synod of Whitby in 664, the biggest gulf in Christianity between how it was practiced in the Atlantic Archipelago (what most call the British Isles) and in Rome concerned t…
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…a Jewish Christ-follower and not definitively a Roman citizen), fits much better with Reed’s long-standing anti-immigrant positions. Reed found in Paul a clear model for the Christian U.S. citizen, but he could not have presented Nero as a model for Trump because Nero is remembered in traditional Christian narratives as a villain. As it turns out, things didn’t go so well when Citizen Paul appealed to Nero. This reviled emperor is notorious for e…
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…ably, the practitioner awakens to the reality that there is no distinction between consciousness and the body or between god or the cosmos and the individual. Given this awareness, anything is possible, even immortality, since there is no real distinction between life and death. On the other hand, postural yoga assumes the unity of the self with the body, so that the attainment of health and beauty as defined in modern terms based on biomedical an…
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…ous or dogmatic reason. His words were valued in the same way as, say, the New Age ‘Law of Attraction’ (formerly known as New Thought): based on their supposedly demonstrable truth, not their religious authority. The devotion of Scientologists to Hubbard may have been weird, slavish, and naïve—but it wasn’t really religious. Or was it? Scientology was intentionally designed to comfort the afflicted, just like religion does. And, just like religion…
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…part. Don’t ever give in to—dare I say it—opening your heart. The presumed New York Times reader is similar, I think: basically secular, basically liberal, and basically intellectual. S/he probably drinks a lot of coffee, spends a good deal of money on food and clothing, and is, in essence, a good person. But anything New Agey or touchy-feely—in fact, anything more demanding than whining about neuroses on the couch of a ritzy psychotherapist—well,…
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