a review of religion and media
THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE presents:
CHUNG KUO – CHINA (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1972), 208 min.
Introduced by Angela Zito
WHEN: Tuesday 24 April 2012, 6:30pm
WHERE: Room 471, 20 Cooper Square [East 5th and Bowery]
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
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The bishops have taken nearly four years to plan their renovation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The new oversight and changes come without input from the Women Religious. The New York Times wrote yesterday:
The sisters were also reprimanded for making public statements that “disagree with or challenge the bishops, who are the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals.” During the debate over the health care overhaul in 2010, American bishops came out in opposition to the health plan, but dozens of sisters, many of whom belong to the Leadership Conference, signed a statement supporting it — support that provided crucial cover for the Obama administration in the battle over health care.
Read National Catholic Reporter’s thorough coverage here. Continue Reading →
Amy Levin: While the image of Oprah endorsing transcendental meditation is about as banal as a priest offering the sacrament, the Queen of the New-Age spiritual marketplace has sold spirituality to those in her pews again. Oprah’s bricolage-like church offered this week’s sermon via her show Next Chapter on the OWN network: transcendental meditation is awesome, readily available for consumption, and so culturally adaptable that even a city in the middle of corn country is bursting with enlightenment.
From Andrew Hartman’s recent post at U.S. Intellectual History, “The Politics of Epistemology,” in which he excerpts the following (and more) from his book Education and the Cold War:
By the beginning of the Cold War, this crisis was seemingly resolved in what Purcell terms the “relativist theory of democracy,” a stripped-down version of Dewey’s pragmatism in which democracy was made normative to America. This relativist theory of democracy blended what its practitioners believed were the best elements of naturalism, especially a faith in the empirical social sciences, with a co-opted version of rationalism, particularly a Platonic belief that American democracy was an end in itself. Although the relativist theorists of democracy considered themselves pragmatists in their attention to means, pragmatism as an identifiable philosophical radicalism, personified by Dewey in its aggressive and reform-oriented form, faded from view. Rather than critique democracy as it existed, relativist theorists assumed that American society was the democratic ideal. The status quo became an end in itself as intellectuals focused their labors on political stability.
(h/t Michael J. Altman) Continue Reading →
This week the Texas Association of Private and Parochial Schools denied an appeal by a Jewish Orthodox school team to have their state semifinals game moved to any night other than Friday night.
Bishop William E. Lori gave the editors of America magazine a lashing today for their criticism of the USCCB’s contraception conniption. Lori, it would seem, still thinks that religious liberty is reserved for his institution alone.
In an article at Washington Post‘s “On Faith,” David Kuo and Patton Dodd wrote this: “The subject of evil is disallowed in our public imagination today.” It’s an absurd statement, one that any foreclosed home owner, imprisoned black kid, unemployed white mom, or me, a single white woman living next to the projects in Brooklyn, can laugh at. They were defending Santorum’s devil talk (not Santorum, they’re moderates after all) and castigating the media for not recognizing that a whole lot of people believe in the devil. Geesh. What they clearly don’t get is that most Americans only really care what Santorum specifically believes because they know he intends to legislate it. On them. Regardless of what they believe.
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PREVIEW SCREENING
WRITING IN WATER 水书
A film on the social life of calligraphy” 书法的集体生活
(42 min., Angela Zito 司徒安director)
Tuesday, March 6, 6:00PM
NYU Tisch School of the Arts
Department of Cinema Studies
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Michelson Theater
Free and open to the public.
Seating is limited and is available first-come, first-seated.
* * * * * Followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker. * * * * * Continue Reading →
Come see me, Paul Raushenbush (HuffPo), Laurie Goodstein (NYT), Bruce Clarke (Economist) and others discuss the state of religion in the media on March 20th at 4:30 at NYU’s Rosenthal Pavilion. Here’s a description:
A moderated panel discussion with leading journalists and broadcasters on issues and trends around they way in which religious identities and communities are represented and reported in the media. The panel will explore the challenges and barriers within the current media landscape that further division and fuel prejudices. They will also identify ways in which the media can be used as a tool to advance understanding and coexistence. The discussion will offer opportunities, methods and resources that enable social activists, religious communicators and aspiring journalism students to be a part of the solution of addressing these challenges. The audience is targeted at a mix of religious communicators, social activists, scholars and NYU journalism students. The event is envisioned to be delivered in partnership with NYU Center for Media and Religion, Odyssey Networks and Religion Communicators Council.
Amy Levin: I’m not sure God would be too happy with Santorum lately – I mean, it’s one thing to defend religious liberty in the name of a Christian nation, but it’s another to use petty language to reference divinely ordained scripture. Despite his claim that he was not criticizing the President’s Christianity, Santorum’s Ohio speech that claimed Obama’s agenda is based on “some phony theology, not a theology based on the Bible,” made serious headlines last week. Phony? I don’t think I’ve heard that verbal jab since 6th grade recess – now that’s an abomination. Continue Reading →
By David Metcalfe
An urban youth lends no pastoral allure to chalky candy charms and flimsy cardboard tokens. Until, within a sepulchral view of a rose adorned skull, faint echoes of divinatory lots and sympathetic magic are discerned beyond St. Valentine’s fallen face.
Wandering beyond mercantile districts, into a dispersed and disputed hagiography, we find him moving with all the invisibility of an adept. Through Jacobus de Voragine, a partner in beheading with St. Denis, whose street leads the alchemist Flamel to his vocation.
Here, outside of time, we see him fully, valorous knight of Christ, and patron over the grand feast of amour fou.
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By George González
No doubt, much of our contemporary consumer society is magical and ecstatic. This extends to our niche and lucrative markets in love and romance. Hallmark and Hollywood movies send the message that the truest expressions of romantic love are ones that sweep up two individuals—preferably heterosexual, white, English speaking, lovely and bourgeois—into a world where little else matters but the passionate love the protagonists share. Similarly, the multinational chocolatiers have to assume this kind of self absorption when they ask us to give that special person in our life a box of chocolates. The companies do not want us to think about the child labor, much of it in the Ivory Coast, that actually produces the cocoa that makes Valentine’s Day sweet for the American consumer of romance. By and large, the chocolate industry is not kind to African farmers. My wish, this Valentine’s Day, is that religious conversations about love turn away from the singular focus on gender—another form of self absorption–and draw more and more upon powerful religious resources for understanding the ethics of sociality and gift exchange. Marcel Mauss, the anthropologist, stressed the ways in which gift giving creates powerful bonds of obligation between the giver and the receiver of a gift precisely because one always gives spiritually and existentially of oneself when one gives a gift. One loses part of one’s soul, as it were, if one fails to reciprocate and repay a gift. To this let us add the more critical idea that when we give gifts in an economy of consumption, the existences of the very people who make the totems and fetishes we live and even love by are rendered invisible by the workings of commodity magic. Jesus, echoing prophetic Judaism, is understood by Christians to stand with and lift up the least among us. For all they can also occlude, religious narratives and practices can also provide resources for remembering. What is owed the least among us whose very real hands, sweat and tears we fail to see?
