Religion Dispatches
This summer, the world’s largest clock began to tick in Mecca—Islam’s holiest city—marking the beginning of Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims. After the inauguration of the clock, there were calls from many Muslims to replace Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)—the world standard for 125 years—with Mecca Time.
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Everyone is an expert when it comes to religion. Those of us in the discipline are well acquainted with the fact that religious convictions are strongly held even by those with no formal training. They can often explain why they believe what they do. At length. This is the dilemma of the religion…
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Zombie Jesus might seem silly to you and horror may not be your thing. But spiritual seekers might want to ponder the imagery of horror precisely because it runs against some of their instincts. Freud famously argued in his essay “The Uncanny” that horrific fairy tales terrified us as children because they reminded us of the vulnerability of our bodies. The horror tradition, maybe especially the zombie narrative, does the same for adults.
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Ours is primarily a linear society which rewards building, doing, improving, and growing. It’s no surprise, then, that countercultural movements have tended to emphasize circles: consensus rather than hierarchy, egalitarianism, nuanced notions of ‘progress.’ Does this sound familiar? It should—it’s behind a lot of what observers have noticed about the Occupy movement: that there are no clear goals, no policy prescriptions, no realistic (i.e., incremental) demands.
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We Americans don’t like to talk about death or the dead, and since many Protestants have difficuty with Catholic practices around prayer to the saints and prayers for the dead, our practices around All Saints’ and All Souls’ days have drifted in very different directions, leaving more space for the secular, non-religious practices around these festivals.
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My mother might not be Tim Tebow’s most typical fan, but she shares many traits with the growing throngs of people who make up his already vast fan base. She breaks the mold in terms of geography and football knowledge. She is from Canada, not the American South, and before I started attending the University of Florida as a doctoral student in religion, she had never been concerned with anyone’s “throwing accuracy,” nor would she have known that it is tough for a running quarterback to make it in the passing-dominated NFL. She is, though, an evangelical Christian and that qualifies her for Tebowmania—even if only via internet connections in Canada.
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The president of the American Atheists knows there is no God, just as I always knew there was a God. Call us fundamentalists, the two of us. But here’s the difference: I am a reformed fundamentalist. I can now entertain the idea that my truth may not be the only truth. I want to understand, to listen and consider other people’s points of view, even when I find their convictions strange or frightening. That’s why I’m here. If I reject this group’s beliefs without understanding them, then I have not changed from the zealot I once was. But I’m nervous and feel a bit nauseous. I’m waiting for lightning that won’t miss this time.
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Now that the curtain’s been pulled back on the false wizardry of a deregulated financial system, and Americans have been left holding a bag full of bank bailouts, home foreclosures, historic levels of unemployment and poverty, and wage stagnation for those with jobs, “loser” is a label most of us can, in one way or another, wear easily in the current economy. So goes the American Dream these days.
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A recent NYT op-ed insists that it was Vivekananda who introduced yoga into the American “national conversation.” But that claim is flat-out wrong. I’m not suggesting that we ignore Vivekananda’s proven significance in the history and development of modern yoga, but the story is much more complex than what Bardach implies. She seems to suggest, after all, that it’s as simple as: Vivekananda introduced yoga to the West, “great minds” loved him, yoga was eventually co-opted by New Age baby-boomers, and it all went downhill from there.
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Michele Bachmann, in spite of “not always getting things right” revealed a profound truth when she promised to bring back the heady days of $2 a gallon gasoline.
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