Religion Dispatches
Meditation is not religion, not spirituality—it’s a technology of upgrading the mind that can enrich one’s life, including one’s religious life. We’re used to the idea of physical fitness. Time to get used to the idea of contemplative fitness, and practice at least as diligently.
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“For me, the process of writing this book was a real eye-opener that demonstrated that even small, some might say, “marginal” religious groups are connected in so many ways to so many other groups, crossing lines of space, race, and time. It led me to rethink the utility of the “marginal” and to discover just how rich those religions are as a way of understanding the world.”
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In recent months. we haven’t always updated the site as much as would have liked or kept in touch as much as we should. Now as we prepare to upgrade the site the site and expand our mission, we’d like to fill in some of the blanks.
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A pair of historians discuss Republican rep. Todd Akin’s remarks on “legitimate rape”: the female body carries a huge burden of representation: her ability to protect the boundaries of her body, and to maintain her purity, reflects the church’s ability to do the same.
Read MoreThe Senate candidate is proud of how his Masters in Divinity shaped his politics.
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Given the spotty history of L. Ron Hubbard’s life and the church’s well-documented vindictiveness toward critics, there’s a great deal of criticism to be found on Scientology. But two new books examine the history of the church without sensationalism or facile mockery.
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If Anders Behring Breivik isn’t a Christian terrorist, then the same can be said of Osama bin Laden and many other Islamist activists—whose writings show that they were much more interested in Islamic history than theology or scripture and imagined themselves as re-creating glorious moments in Islamic history in their own imagined wars.
Read MoreA political, not theological, co-belligerence.
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When I moved to New York City just over a year ago, I started going to church. More precisely, I started going to the churches—dozens of them—that were located in New York City’s public schools. I attended services all over Manhattan, in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
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The Times managed to find a Gandhi scholar who would argue that the greatest hero of radical resistance would endorse the critics of Occupy Wall Street.
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