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Think Yoga is a Religion? Try Youth Soccer!

By Joanna Brooks

…that is a religion right now, no question, hands down, it’s youth soccer. Soccer is like Saturday morning church in the suburbs. It’s pretty much compulsory. Dutifully we worship the small people wearing the brightly-colored silken vestments. Faithfully we line up to form “spirit tunnels,” touching fingertips with parents from opposing teams. Lovingly we serve juice box and orange slice sacraments. We hand-sew lavish new banners each season, banne…

Indonesia: As Volcano Erupts, a Spiritual Loss

By Mark Woodward

…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…

Religious Right “Compassion” and Other Lies

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…rable, not worth the same rights or responsibilities as anyone else on the planet, and to top it off you are, according to their god, worthy of death – unless you change. Yes, with that sort of ingrained bullying built into church and society, it would seem hopeless to think that you would have to live your entire life being the subject of condemning sermons, the butt of numerous jokes, and the target of laws banning you from doing many things oth…

A Life After Death Double-Feature: Eastwood’s Hereafter and Noe’s Enter the Void

By Jay Michaelson

…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…

Conversion Story #643 (not a real number)

By Amina Wadud

…my transforming consciousness about toxins and waste for the body and the spirit. Entering Islam was partially an accident. I was still reading about traditions other than the one of my birth. Likewise I began to read about Islam. I knew I understood only a part of it from books alone. So I finally took myself to a mosque to investigate the other part: the lived reality. Although I had no intention at that time of becoming a Muslim, I think the f…

On Death and After-Death

By Amina Wadud

…ure, imagine that! We also have the notion of resurrection but not just in spirit, but in body too. In fact, the Qur’an says, even if you take the dead and throw pieces hither and yon, the pieces will all come back together to face the Judgment. But again, every one will be brought to final Judgment, no gender distinction. Now, you’d think it would be like passing an algebra test, but it’s not. Because there are things that weigh in here, unlike y…

Sacrifice

By Amina Wadud

…me time to be there, but not in the ihram for umrah will give me a kind of spiritual quiet in the storm of people and practice. I’ll need it. According to the books, it is also a mandated to wait a bit before assuming ihram for hajj. Then, once again, I must don the ihram after making my intention for hajj proper. This must be done before noon on the 8th day of Zul-Hijjah, when we will all go about 5-6 kilometers east of Makkah, to a place called…

Gospel and Soul Lose a King and Queen

By Anthea Butler

…Walker’s voice and presence filled many a church, but it was her generous spirit that supported the careers of many singers that made her an exceptional woman and gospel singer. Burke’s influence on country western music, as well as the Rolling Stones, Al Green and others, was a seamless marriage of the sacred and secular. Burke, ordained at the age of 7, also was a licensed mortician, coupling two of the historic occupations for African American…

Chilean Mine Rescue: Largest Global Spiritual Event Ever?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ill no doubt highlight the rescue. But, I have to wonder what impact their spiritual, biblical, ethical, and other insights might have brought to a worldwide spiritual experience that unfolded through the day on October 13—the Feast of Digital Ascension, if I had any say in such things—had more seen their ministries extending beyond the walls of churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples and into the waves of 1s and 0s that drew millions together…

“Muslim Gospel” Revealing the “Christian Truth” Excites the Da Vinci Code Set

By Annette Yoshiko Reed

…hence, denied either his death on the cross or the presence of his divine spirit in the body that died. The elevation of a divine Christ beyond bodily flesh is also what’s at stake in texts from Nag Hammadi, like the Apocalypse of Peter and the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, which describe Christ as watching (and even laughing) when a substitute is crucified in his place. By contrast, the GBarn posits a wholly human Jesus, who explicitly deni…