Religion Dispatches
…. The bread for the host can be so low in gluten as to qualify for “gluten-free” labeling, apparently. The wine can be a barely fermented drink called “mustum” (a word I have never encountered outside of Catholic liturgical documents). Anyone who cannot receive the bread or the wine can commune fully in one or the other. And in a rather touching detail, a priest who is too infirm to stand at the altar, as canon law requires, can get a dispensation…
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…ering and liberation from suffering. They’re everywhere. I’m not trying to promote Buddhism but dharma. If I’m careful about doing this, it has the potential to unite religions. It has the potential to unite everybody else, too. Let’s say I’m a Sunni Muslim living in Baghdad. Are you envisioning a situation in which I have access to a secular meditation center where I can practice meditation outside of my routine of daily prayer? Yes, of course. N…
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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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…ian Trends, David Barrett, told Wagner that by 1996 Barrett had over a thousand apostolic networks in his global research database, representing well over 100 million Christians. How many Christians are in apostolic networks over a decade later? We can only guess. C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation has pulled together those apostolic networks, into what might be, for all we know, the biggest Protestant “nondenominational” (or postdenomina…
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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…
Read More…arket economics. One of the best examples is the Rev. Robert Sirico of the free market Acton Institute, who released a video attempting to defend his views against Evangelii Gaudium. Best “who, me?” line: “Who is advocating a market without regulations, without law?” On the Eternal Word Television Network program The World Over last week, Bishop Robert Morlino, the bishop of Madison, Wisconsin, discussed a portion of Evangelii Gaudium in which the…
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…; cooperation is perfectly possible, so it pays to make serious efforts to promote it, which means being responsive to the changing concerns of everyone else in the web. There are rights and wrongs done on every side; it makes no sense to measure how much blame accrues to any one side, because finger-pointing blocks the way to cooperation. Self-esteem comes from promoting cooperation; if self-esteem must depend on showing one’s strength (an open q…
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