Religion Dispatches
When I showed up, the room at Harvard Divinity School was already overflowing. World-renowned professors were packing the aisles along with undergrads, standing in the doorways, and squeezing in behind furniture. At the front of the room stood Bhikkhu Bodhi—a short, soft-spoken Buddhist monk…
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Philosopher Simon Critchley on evangelical atheists, the ‘supreme fiction’ in politics or love, and why the debate over whether you believe in a god is massively irrelevant.
Read MoreSteve Jobs invented stuff, and that stuff changed the world.
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Would that it were true that, as Ryan said, “Catholic social teaching is indispensable for officeholders”; Mitt Romney’s description of Ryan’s budget as “marvelous” would no longer be ludicrous.
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Recent analyses of religion in the 99% Movement tend to begin with a focus simply on pluralism, asking how diverse forms of religious transcendence—particularly in justice-minded congregations—have aligned themselves with the still-growing wave of Occupations. But the intimacy of life in a park or along a sidewalk is causing traditions to do something more than “coexist” plurally. Religions are colluding and combining.
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Yes, your colleagues would laugh if you went out to protest. Marie Antoinette laughed too, until she found herself smiling up from the bottom of a wicker basket.
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If I were CEO of Trinity Wall Street, I’d be alarmed at the idea of the “unspecified use” apparently demanded by the OWS protesters. But, of course, Trinity Wall Street does not have a CEO, it has ministers.
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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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Thursday morning a dozen occupiers addressed forty or so clergy. We clergy were all somewhat skeptical of the demand for public space. You could hear the ministerial, rabbinical hrumph, hrumph in the room. (Most of us had never occupied Zucotti Park and a downward trend in temperature wasn’t going to improve on that.) But the occupiers edged toward the theological as they articulated a need for communal, inspirational, face-to-face contact in which they could “appear” to one another.
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People love to stay immune from the connections between the sacred and the profane, holy space and “regular” space, tented space and the well-appointed space of a mansion. They try to tell us that politics and religion never meet. Or that money is “dirty” and therefore can get away with its meanness. Deliverance from these false dichotomies is our greatest need as a country. Money is holy and just and good when used for holy and just and good purposes. It is not “dirty” and therefore the property of those naughty boys of Wall Street.
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