Religion Dispatches
…God along, Keats used a live feed from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, where scientists are smashing subatomic particles together in the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson and other things that might shed light on the origins of the universe. Votive candles and smoldering incense set on a deep red fabric made for an altar in front of the monitor, which showed cross-sections of the collider lit up with a spirograph of pastel whenever…
Read More…r beers and five wines.” Well done, sir. A group of US Senators are asking Switzerland to reconsider an immigration policy that puts a de facto ban on Mormon missionaries to the country. Citizens in Sweden say they won’t let the suicide bombing in Stockholm shake their belief in tolerance. In the wake of last month’s Oregon bombing case, Attorney General Eric Holder defended the use of sting operations where undercover agents are sent into US mosq…
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…the “appeal of Bush’s born-again experience” was the way his “escape from freedom” resonated with Bush’s conservative evangelical supporters. Their “powerful emotional affinity” for candidate Bush thus is less a Christian community’s embrace of a prodigal son than the result of a dysfunctional psychological syndrome propounded in 1941 by Eric Fromm in his book Escape from Freedom. Republican Gomorrah, however, rises above these problems and still…
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…derived right to marriage, but it also often violates the derived right to freedom of conscience and freedom from religion.” On economic issues, Michaeli lambasted Netanyahu for “clinging to the almost religious faith that growth will trickle down,” when “the gaps have only been growing and growing.” She noted that half a million Israelis took to the streets in 2011 to protest growing economic inequality. But it’s on the ghosts that stymie a resol…
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…e newspapers the following day, the president was not amused. Graham fared better with Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, offering political advice and volunteering to undertake diplomatic missions in the course of his evangelistic travels. But Graham’s most notorious entanglement was with Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon. Graham and Nixon forged a friendship that endured until Nixon’s death in 1994. While I was researching God in th…
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…eligious freedoms. It was the same year that Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which prevents laws that place an undue burden on people’s ability to express their religion. The religious methods of slaughter such as the Jewish shechita and the Islamic dhabh remain in most countries, though that is slowly changing. The Dutch parliament recently passed a bill requiring an animal to be stunned before slaughter, following in the f…
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…ruly loved themSelves. For Daly, as she eventually came to see it, debates between Jungianism and Freudianism, between Marxism and Nazism, Christianity and Judaism or Buddhism, were all what Freud (whose work she also drew on) would have called “the narcissism of small differences.” All were, for her, sects within the grand (and tragic) religion of patriarchy. To move beyond patriarchy—spiraling out and sparking real connection between and among (…
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…ot!” Are we to be stuck trading insults like schoolchildren, or is there a better way to discuss the two eternally unanswerable questions: the quest for ultimate meaning and the search for the origin of everything? At a time when Islamist extremists strap on bombs and blow up women and children; when the United States has just come staggering out of the oppressive thirty-year-plus embrace of the dumb-as-mud, hate-filled religious right; when evang…
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…t of us in the U.S. don’t understand the complexities of the relationships between religious groups in Africa, and some of us tend to draw a very stark picture of Muslims against Christians. Can you help us better understand the religious dynamics of peace and war in Kadugli and more broadly in Sudan? The issue is complex and has more to do with Arabization: some Arabs imposing their own culture on black people, refusing, denying other black cultu…
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…nist Yehudi Menuhin, whose patronage, enabled him to teach yoga in London, Switzerland, the United States, and Paris. Before Iyengar and other entrepreneurial yogis popularized it, yoga had moved from the counterculture of Indian ascetic renouncers, to the counterculture of turn-of-the-century American practitioners of tantra, to the counterculture of Transcendentalism and metaphysical religion, to the counterculture of proponents of physical cu…
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