Religion Dispatches
…I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very little are not the abusers of cheap grace, but that others in well-feathered nests who are preaching sacrifice might be in real trouble on the cheap grace front. Obama cannot and should not condemn those in the electorate who buy into Romney’s “there will be showers of blessing” message, but he probably does …
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…y mostly older colleagues was sometimes a challenge. In my late 20s, I was lost in the sea of 40,000 students from all over the world. One afternoon, desperate for advice, I went to the office of my colleague Steve Tollefson, and we had one of those long, rambling conversations about teaching that inevitably forks into other topics. Steve was in his 50s, but he could talk to anyone, from 18-year-old freshmen to emeriti faculty in their 70s and 80s…
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…ans would be attracted to, appreciate and consider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric would fade and, more than likely, movies like Expelled wouldn’t be made in the first place….
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…llar annual budget is funded almost exclusively by ticket sales, and these tickets are not cheap (ranging this year, for example, from $210-$300 depending on time of purchase). This pays for the basic infrastructure as well as expenses like a hefty per-person/per-day use fee charged by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, a significant portion of each year’s budget is set aside to fund many of the large-scale art installations various parti…
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…ough former Catholic strongholds like New York and Philadelphia that have closed churches by the dozen. And the numbers make it clear that the Catholic rate of disaffiliation isn’t an artifact of the general trend toward non-affiliation; in fact, it’s the other way around: the unprecedented number of Catholics leaving the church is a major driver of the increase in “nones.” A recent Pew Poll, which provides one of the most detailed looks to date a…
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…(CDC) reported an outbreak of a rare cancer among a handful of gay men in Los Angeles. Soon after, mainstream news outlets briefly reported the findings but despite its rapid spread, the cancer, which would be identified as AIDS, did not receive ongoing or thorough coverage. By 1982, nearly 800 AIDS cases had been diagnosed. According to one study, infants and children were increasingly infected. Although a threat to the general population was qu…
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…SoulCycle is gambling that people outside of New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles (which, together, account for 95% of SoulCycle’s revenue) will be willing to drop $30+ in order to pedal in unison with strangers, listening to messages of empowerment, growth, and self-actualization. But SoulCycle is also part of a larger gamble: namely, that Americans will be willing to meld the forms of spirituality and the forms of capitalism in more and mor…
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…items within their borders (as is already the case federally with lottery tickets). A Republican-controlled Congress could then impose a nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills or certain contraceptives. (Republican-controlled state legislatures have already demonstrated a willingness to enact questionable legislation for nothing more than its intimidation factor.) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court uphel…
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…ay that exactly. And so that’s one aspect of religious emotion, when we’re lost in a mystical thing, or lost in the Avatar movie, or something like that. How I understand it, is that there are different qualities of what we would loosely call emotion. I make a distinction between feeling and emotion in order to talk about them. There is such thing as deep, essential feeling which is part of our human nature. And we have it under many conditions. I…
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…the Dead altar scene, and a mass-produced crucifix. The surrealist painter Salvador Dalí used images of ants throughout his works, perhaps best seen in his 1931 Persistence of Memory, and the infamous 1929 film Un Chien Andalou, (made with Luis Buñuel). When Dalí was a child he found a wounded bat, which he kept, only to return later to find the bat being devoured by ants. Ants are scavengers, feeding off the dead and decaying. It doesn’t take muc…
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