Religion Dispatches
…museum escape the fiction of its own secularity and thereby rediscover its spiritual roots, its spiritual task? It is telling that Sweeney’s bold vision was not entirely successful. He resigned from the Guggenheim when Harry Frank Guggenheim encouraged him to promote “a more popular educational approach.” And he was later asked to step down from his post at the Houston Museum when his “innovative if controversial curatorial approach came up agains…
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…ulate a vibrant Jewish thinking beyond the binary of theism and atheism. A number of thinkers have reached the conclusion that the aniconic ramification of the monotheistic creed is the undoing and demythologization of theism whence it follows that the final iconoclastic achievement of monotheism would call for destroying the idol of the very God personified as the deity that must be worshipped without being idolized. Levinas had this in mind when…
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…mprovement shifts the aims of asceticism; the body is no longer a means to spiritual illumination but an end in itself. “The new idea offered by the contemporary culture of cosmetic surgery,” writes Mead, “is that it is the vessel itself that we must value, rather than the soul or spirit that it contains.” Modern body perfectionists seek to transcend the limits of the “natural” body (if ever there was such a thing) through drugs, exercise, diet, a…
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…ng one’s neighbor and one’s enemies, or indeed by any of the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, or self-control. But the rugged, even reckless masculinity championed by evangelicals has always been accompanied by a softer, feminine side. In fact, it was precisely the loveliness, purity, and vulnerability of women that required the protection of tough, masculine men. In the words of bestselling evangel…
Read More…nd beauty of diversity. The phenomenon known as religion After teaching for 15 years in the southern part of the US, I have understood how important it was to explain the phenomenonological approach to religious studies. In brief, there is this phenomenon amongst humans and through out human history, known as “religion”. We look at this phenomenon as part of what it means to be human. Nothing more; nothing ominous; just like looking at different k…
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…o yearns for a love that Dean can never fully give him. With the sensual spirituality (or spiritual paganism, if you like) secularized into mere “kicks,” the moral balance of On the Road lurches to one side. In the book, there’s a productive tension between the evanescent, yet incandescent, mysticism of pure human experience on the one hand, and the deep ethical consequences of human relationship on the other. This is a crucial and recurring rel…
Read More…in this country, and we urge people on all sides of this issue to act in a spirit of mutual respect and civility toward those with a different opinion.” As we’ve reported here at RD, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, responding to a letter from the Church’s First Presidency read over the pulpits during Sunday meeting in June 2008 and other organizing efforts headed by high-ranking and local Church leaders, contributed the…
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…especially regular churchgoers, to redirect their giving. There are untold numbers of religious/spiritual non-profits, including women’s religious orders that are good alternatives to the local parish for providing services in the community. If one is conscience stricken about worshipping in a building one does not pay to heat, I suggest either worshipping elsewhere for a while and/or placing a check in the collection made out to the power company…
Read More…Baby Conference. At the conference they honored Michelle Duggar, mother of 19 children as an example who “has encouraged many women to embrace the blessing of children and rejoice in the high calling of motherhood.” Finally, while 2010 saw developments in the Creationist Movement, it also sought to frame environmentalism as an anti-Christian Pantheisic religion that threatens human life across the planet and launched the Mysterious Islands Campai…
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…sted that the bill was crafted to avoid ruffling the feathers of the large numbers of practicing Christians currently working in Quebec’s public sector—a less than insignificant number of which do happen to wear (typically small) crucifixes—and thus the visual code aimed its sights more narrowly on undesirable religious minorities, while at the same time allowing the government to proclaim the even-handedness of its approach. But whatever the act…
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