Rethinking Religion After Latest Holistic Death
A participant at a holistic spa was, it turns out, “cooked to death.” Instead of another wave of panic, maybe we need to rethink our categories.
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Missing the Forest for the Witches
Eager to note that a witch story involved a Glenda in Salem, many seem to have missed what’s actually disturbing about it.
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The Good Liberal Fear of a Yoga Planet
By now, it should be clear that William Broad’s broadside against yoga (sorry about that) in the New York Times is thin on facts and thick on rhetoric. Excerpted from his forthcoming book, the article, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body,” is a full-on, un-fair-and-balanced…
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Jeff Sharlet’s Weird Religion, in 13 Chapters
For Jeff Sharlet, the weird is out there: lost in the Wild West; hidden behind suburban fences and Hell Houses; on scratchy 1920s blues recordings and Mennonite funerals. His rare gift has been to make friends with the weird and almost make peace with it—which doesn’t mean he’s not skeptical.
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No, I Don’t Owe My Yoga Mat to Vivekananda
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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Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City
If there is any communal rite of passage at Burning Man, it is the Temple Burn on Sunday night, the event’s finale. Not everyone comes out for this event; some would rather dance to techno music or chat up a neighbor on the next bar stool instead of joining tens of thousands of Burners sitting on the ground quietly waiting for the temple to burn down, taking all their messages and their pain—they hope—with it.
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Rick Perry’s Jesus Imperative: A Report from Saturday’s Mega-Rally
The people who gathered at Reliant Stadium are not just Rick Perry’s spiritual army, raised up, as Perry and others imagine it, in the spirit of Joel 2 to sound an alarm and prepare the people for Judgment Day. They are the ground troops the religious right set out four decades ago to create, and duplicate over generations, for the ongoing culture wars.
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A Better Form of Atheism: Rescuing the Christian Tradition from Religion
“If I were to think of a use that I would want my book to be put to, it’s to try to provide for anti-capitalist Christians a more theologically robust response to that kind of thing, something that goes beyond proof-texting and presents a more convincing theological argument.”
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Is Terry Jones the Death Rattle of the White Male Protestant?
When survival is the name of the game, how are White Male Heterosexual Conservative Christians going to rally the diminishing troops in a desperate bid to hold on to the power slipping from their hands?
Read MoreGluttons for Jesus
A New Ager, a Jew, and Muslim walk into a church…
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