Religion Dispatches
…Afro-Caribbean form of quasi-Christian religious practice: Vodou, with its spirit possession, sacrifices, and all. The old quip about Haiti—that the nation is “85% Catholic, 15% Protestant, and 100% Vodou”—has long legs and longer appeal. These percentages have been very helpfully emended in a companion piece on RD by Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado, who reminds us of the intense evangelical Protestant attention paid to Central America and the Caribbe…
Read More…e, whose support he sought and whom he publicly thanked last year for his “spiritual guidance to politicians like me.” Finally, the outrages of Hagee pushed the McCain campaign one step over the line, leading to the formal break. But one interesting piece of this story has received too little comment: Hagee’s widely documented anti-Catholic bias did not move McCain to break with him. Only when Hagee sermons surfaced that offended Jews did McCain m…
Read More
…nister. Michaelson, in his late thirties, is a freelance teacher of Jewish spirituality, known particularly as the leader of Nehirim, an organization fostering spiritual consciousness among GLBT Jews. A poet and prolific essayist, he is also co-founder of the literary journal Zeek, and a regular voice in the Jewish press (and lately the Huffington Post), whose writing challenges the ethnic and mythological components of Jewish identity for the sak…
Read More
…e to our residence to ruin it.” This sounded to many like a declaration of spiritual warfare against the encroachment of their new neighbors. Just last year, when a sexy billboard for the TV show 90210 appeared over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a busy Interstate that many of the Hasidim use on a daily basis, the community objected. It was around that time that discussion began about the Bedford bike lane, which was placed there by the city in 2…
Read More
…lot of it will be empty blather, but we can hope that at least some of America’s pastors will help us think about what showing good will toward all of God’s children actually requires—and (speaking of angels) about how the better angels of our nature can actually be awakened. In that spirit, we and those preachers might well consider the import of this passage from a lovely prayer by Howard Thurman: “Give me the listening ear. I seek this day the…
Read More
…e might better understand the workings of his own mind and experience true spiritual awakening, once said simply, “I teach only suffering and the end of suffering.” So profound were his insights and those of his interlocutors throughout the ages, however, that modern psychologists and other caring professionals, particularly those in the United States, have found great utility in them. The emergence of such treatments as mindfulness-based stress r…
Read More
…mon ground—are almost nonexistent? When we ran the global “Science and the Spiritual Quest” program just a decade ago, many leading scientists took moderate views. Religion did not need to be destroyed, they told us, as long as the basic conditions for doing science were not undercut. Theologians and religious leaders responded in kind: religionists have every reason to support scientific research and to learn from its results. You’ll have to look…
Read More
…quitous quest to, as Saint Paul instructed, die to self. Bauer’s childhood spiritual guides did their part to fill her with rapture anxiety by screening A Thief in the Night, and her Sunday school instructor effectively scared the children with stories of casting Satan from the foot of her bed with an exorcistic command. But there were no faith healings, no instance of being banned from watching The Smurfs or listening to The Beatles, and no epile…
Read More
…just brains in vats is an indirect challenge to such sentiments. That same spirit of subversion has been behind a recent wave of books lambasting religion. Yet the ascent of thinkers like Dawkins, Dennett, and Sam Harris is just one more chapter in the history of science’s victory to becoming the ultimate arbiter of truth. For most of the past century, the humanities, and its penchant for complex theories privileging nurture over nature, directly…
Read More
…zing. At its height, the UFW had 70,000 workers under contract; today that number is no more than 5,000 and the UFW serves mostly as a hub of a network of nonprofit agencies. Ganz does not explain why Chavez came unglued or how Dederich came into his life and was able to wield such influence in the union. But in telling the truth about the matter, Ganz plants a red flag on the problem for those who come later. This is important in part because wha…
Read More