Religion Dispatches
Harry Potter’s world would be more familiar to a scientist than to a mystic. Yes, it includes goblins, charms, and curses; but these are all basically explicable according to their own internal logic. Yet there isn’t anything that transcends human knowledge.
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The film is disingenuous—or rather the marketing for it is—as it suggests that we make a choice between nature and grace. One reviewer suggests that it’s about the middle way, about the redemption of siblings.
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More personal and less archetypical than her previous records, Welch’s new album tells stories of American religious realism and spiritual strivings both anonymously mythical and personally individual.
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When Michael Landon died, many Christians thought they’d lost one of their own. Knowing that he was defined at least in part by language, when Landon finally told a Jewish story in a Little House episode, he used Yiddish as a marker of identity.
Read More“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” illumines the hypocrisy of a nation unable to check and challenge itself concerning its own moral hubris.
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Ultimately it’s disappointing that Trey Parker and Matt Stone—two of the best satirists around—should have chosen such soft religious targets: missionaries from Utah. The finale to season 14 of South Park (the censured episode about the propriety of depicting Mohammed in a bear costume) was gutsier by far. By comparison, poking fun at clueless Mormon teenagers is a cop-out. It’s a waste of theatrical talent.
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Knapp: I’m a relative newcomer to this public discourse. It’s nice when other artists say, “Listen, just doing your art is important.” I’ve had positive conversations with people in the Christian music industry as well. I have a long history with so many of them, and it’s been nice to reconnect. I’ve received a lot of encouragement from people who just really understand the importance of genuine relationships based on compassion and grace.
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Structured around a family (mother, father, three children) which suffers a terrible loss, The Tree of Life is an extended midrash, or commentary, on the Book of Job, a verse of which forms the epigraph to the film and which is sermonized upon during an extended scene at a church. At once essentially Catholic and doggedly scientific in its worldview, its central family becomes an archetype, undergoing processes of childlike wonderment, Oedipal lust and rage, the loss of innocence, the loss of faith, and finally, it seems, redemption.
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And so the world still turns. No rapture, no living hell, no Armageddon. We are where we were before the weekend with no signs of Christ’s return, facing the same ol’ same ol’: Arnold’s love child, Newt’s flame-out, life without Oprah. Perhaps this might be a nice teachable moment to reflect on all this—not nonsense at all, but rather an illuminating cultural moment that reveals an awful lot about the role of religion in our crazy world. What are the key takeaways from the “mediapocalypse”? Here are five for your consideration:
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Attempts to legally define yoga would amount to identifying a bounded tradition of symbols, practices, and ideas, which in reality vary across yoga studios and ashrams within the United States alone.
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