Religion Dispatches
…harist, it included a restatement of a prohibition of totally wheat-gluten-free hosts. This was often reported as something of a snub of the Celiac sufferers (or gluten intolerant) among the faithful. But reading through the directive and the supporting documentation, I was struck by their attempts to accommodate communicants who can’t tolerate some essential aspect of the rite. The bread for the host can be so low in gluten as to qualify for “glu…
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…Lies That is Amway/Quixtar and their Motivational Organizations—available free on the author’s Web site—told me that the controversies stalking the company continue to this day. Scheibeler said that he had “worked with local victims and initiated a UK government investigation in which the DTI/BERR (Department of Trade and Industry/Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform) took legal action against Amway and is waiting for an appeals court decisio…
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…r is “no.” Look at the rich countries of Europe; look at America. They are free from material suffering, yet still they are suffering. Still, they don’t have peace. So what is needed on top of that is inner peace, inner joy, and compassion. Look at the problem from the reverse point of view: if we create inner peace, inner joy, and compassion, does that create world peace? No, because there are still people who are hungry; there are still people i…
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…tle to do with the worship of a marginalized Jew, named Jesus, who came to free the poor and oppressed. This counterfeit Christian community worships power, desires control, and imagines the world revolving around self-sufficient men (and a few women). I call it “Mad Man Religion.” Mad Man Religion looks just like Christianity. It connects religious practices to free market practices like you would connect pieces from a Lego set. And it offers to…
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…s or riding a bicycle so that you can charge your cell phone or blend your free smoothie, the spirit has that vibe, that playful spirit of early hope. Our skateboarder is ready to ride. Here you can see mushrooms growing out of logs injected with coffee grounds. Beautiful, edible oyster mushrooms. You can buy a nice meal in a glass dish, which is recycled. You can get a free recyclable cup to drink water out of a fountain. You can sign a climate r…
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…demon re-infestations. As with inner-city cockroaches, the price of demon-free living was constant vigilance. Alix Spiegel called some of the practices she saw at Haggard’s church “medieval,” while René Holvast described this new way as incommensurable with modern Christianity: Conversations and discussions with some missionary colleagues did not seem to lead to mutual understanding. The usual evangelical ways of reasoning fell mute. It seemed to…
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…s. White nationalists will support protectionist measures, and they oppose free trade in capital goods because they oppose free trade (or open borders) for labor. Whether or not they gain traction by claiming that the stock market and banks are controlled by Jews depends on whether people of goodwill are able to offer a more compelling vision of change. With Obama in the White House, I think we can expect more of the same, plus some. Some White na…
Read More…heon points out, there is a danger that when we understand ourselves to be promoting pluralism, we are enforcing a tacit division between “good” and “bad” religions (what Leonard Primiano called a “two-tiered model of religion”). A recent example is the fracas that occurred last year when The Satanic Temple offered to re-enact a black mass as part of a Harvard cultural studies club. The Temple’s multicultural performance was quickly reinterpreted…
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…s our enemies, and the latter constructs a false sense of independence and freedom.” I don’t know if we Americans, especially Christians in America, want to be freed from our demons. The late New Testament scholar Walter Wink defined the demonic as an array of human and supra-human forces aligned to destroy life. The demonic was both individual and structural, personal and collective, sentient and mechanical. Wink’s expansive way of writing about…
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…ng any distinctive rights or obligations: bye-bye to the establishment and free-exercise clauses of the Constitution, etc. They might as well protect us from the “establishment” of widget and the “free exercise” thereof. Both are meaningless, since neither “widget” nor “religion” point to anything specific. Linker, on the other hand, takes the exact opposite tack: he legislates the meaning of “religion” as those particular referents marked by the…
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