Category: Timely

Oprah's God

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On Wednesday, May 25th, Oprah ended her daytime television show after 25 years.  No gifts nor guests graced her final broadcast.  God and Jo Piazza were watching.

by Jo Piazza

For an hour last Wednesday afternoon Oprah Winfrey stood center stage in her Chicago studio, no guests, no surprises, no free cars—just Oprah.

If you’ve ever doubted that Oprah has spent the past 25 years cultivating a ministry of O, Wednesday’s finale of her long running talk show should have convinced you otherwise.

“Everybody has a calling. Everybody is called. My great wish for all of you is that you carry what you are supposed to be doing forward. Start embracing the light that is calling you and use your light to serve the world,” were among the sentiments Winfrey preached, heavy on the eye contact, in what can only be described as divine lighting that can make a 57 year old woman’s skin look so smooth. “You’re responsible for the energy you create for yourself and the energy you give to others.”

I was perhaps more sensitive to looking at Oprah through the lens of religious experience than I would have been on an average Wednesday, having recently finished Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. Continue Reading →

Oprah’s God

Posted on by

On Wednesday, May 25th, Oprah ended her daytime television show after 25 years.  No gifts nor guests graced her final broadcast.  God and Jo Piazza were watching.

by Jo Piazza

For an hour last Wednesday afternoon Oprah Winfrey stood center stage in her Chicago studio, no guests, no surprises, no free cars—just Oprah.

If you’ve ever doubted that Oprah has spent the past 25 years cultivating a ministry of O, Wednesday’s finale of her long running talk show should have convinced you otherwise.

“Everybody has a calling. Everybody is called. My great wish for all of you is that you carry what you are supposed to be doing forward. Start embracing the light that is calling you and use your light to serve the world,” were among the sentiments Winfrey preached, heavy on the eye contact, in what can only be described as divine lighting that can make a 57 year old woman’s skin look so smooth. “You’re responsible for the energy you create for yourself and the energy you give to others.”

I was perhaps more sensitive to looking at Oprah through the lens of religious experience than I would have been on an average Wednesday, having recently finished Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. Continue Reading →

Oprah’s God

Posted on by

On Wednesday, May 25th, Oprah ended her daytime television show after 25 years.  No gifts nor guests graced her final broadcast.  God and Jo Piazza were watching.

by Jo Piazza

For an hour last Wednesday afternoon Oprah Winfrey stood center stage in her Chicago studio, no guests, no surprises, no free cars—just Oprah.

If you’ve ever doubted that Oprah has spent the past 25 years cultivating a ministry of O, Wednesday’s finale of her long running talk show should have convinced you otherwise.

“Everybody has a calling. Everybody is called. My great wish for all of you is that you carry what you are supposed to be doing forward. Start embracing the light that is calling you and use your light to serve the world,” were among the sentiments Winfrey preached, heavy on the eye contact, in what can only be described as divine lighting that can make a 57 year old woman’s skin look so smooth. “You’re responsible for the energy you create for yourself and the energy you give to others.”

I was perhaps more sensitive to looking at Oprah through the lens of religious experience than I would have been on an average Wednesday, having recently finished Kathryn Lofton’s Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon. Continue Reading →

Religion, Saudi Arabia's Symbolic Resource

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Stephane Lacroix writes for Foreign Policy that the same types of unrest that are taking place across the Middle East have bypassed Saudi Arabia for two reasons, one “material” and the other “symbolic.”  The first is most obviously Saudi Arabia’s immense oil reserves and subsequent national wealth.  The second is what Lacroix calls the government’s co-option of “the Sahwa, the powerful Islamist network which would have to play a major role in any sustained mobilization of protests.”  From the article:

Like the Brotherhood in Egypt, the Sahwa in Saudi Arabia is by far the largest and best organized non-state group, with arguably hundreds of thousands of members. Its mobilizing capacity is huge, far ahead of any other group, including the tribes which have for the last few decades lost a lot of their political relevance. An illustration of this were the 2005 municipal elections, which provided observers with an unprecedented opportunity to measure the ability of Saudi political actors to mobilize their supporters. In most districts of the major cities, Sahwa-backed candidates won with impressive scores.

Continue Reading →

Religion, Saudi Arabia’s Symbolic Resource

Posted on by

Stephane Lacroix writes for Foreign Policy that the same types of unrest that are taking place across the Middle East have bypassed Saudi Arabia for two reasons, one “material” and the other “symbolic.”  The first is most obviously Saudi Arabia’s immense oil reserves and subsequent national wealth.  The second is what Lacroix calls the government’s co-option of “the Sahwa, the powerful Islamist network which would have to play a major role in any sustained mobilization of protests.”  From the article:

Like the Brotherhood in Egypt, the Sahwa in Saudi Arabia is by far the largest and best organized non-state group, with arguably hundreds of thousands of members. Its mobilizing capacity is huge, far ahead of any other group, including the tribes which have for the last few decades lost a lot of their political relevance. An illustration of this were the 2005 municipal elections, which provided observers with an unprecedented opportunity to measure the ability of Saudi political actors to mobilize their supporters. In most districts of the major cities, Sahwa-backed candidates won with impressive scores.

Continue Reading →

Religion, Saudi Arabia’s Symbolic Resource

Posted on by

Stephane Lacroix writes for Foreign Policy that the same types of unrest that are taking place across the Middle East have bypassed Saudi Arabia for two reasons, one “material” and the other “symbolic.”  The first is most obviously Saudi Arabia’s immense oil reserves and subsequent national wealth.  The second is what Lacroix calls the government’s co-option of “the Sahwa, the powerful Islamist network which would have to play a major role in any sustained mobilization of protests.”  From the article:

Like the Brotherhood in Egypt, the Sahwa in Saudi Arabia is by far the largest and best organized non-state group, with arguably hundreds of thousands of members. Its mobilizing capacity is huge, far ahead of any other group, including the tribes which have for the last few decades lost a lot of their political relevance. An illustration of this were the 2005 municipal elections, which provided observers with an unprecedented opportunity to measure the ability of Saudi political actors to mobilize their supporters. In most districts of the major cities, Sahwa-backed candidates won with impressive scores.

Continue Reading →

The Birth of Religion

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We used to think agriculture gave rise to cities and later to writing, art and religion.  Now the world’s oldest temple suggests the urge to worship sparked civilization.

by Charles C. Mann

Below is an exclusive excerpt from the June issue of the National Geographic magazine, on newsstands now and online here:

Anthropologists have assumed that organized religion began as a way of salving the tensions that inevitably arose when hunter-gatherers settled down, became farmers, and developed large societies. Compared to a nomadic band, the society of a village had longer term, more complex aims—storing grain and maintaining permanent homes. Villages would be more likely to accomplish those aims if their members were committed to the collective enterprise. Though primitive religious practices—burying the dead, creating cave art and figurines—had emerged tens of thousands of years earlier, organized religion arose, in this view, only when a common vision of a celestial order was needed to bind together these big, new, fragile groups of humankind. It could also have helped justify the social hierarchy that emerged in a more complex society: Those who rose to power were seen as having a special connection with the gods. Communities of the faithful, united in a common view of the world and their place in it, were more cohesive than ordinary clumps of quarreling people. Continue Reading →

TechNoLove

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Jonathan Franzen takes to the New York Times op-ed page to proclaim that — oh yes, indeedy — technology is killing love.  Blackberries aren’t birds, birds are part of the environment, the environment is love, and love means facing death directly, or something like that:

To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

Continue Reading →

Act of Seeing

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From Genevieve Yue’s review at Reverse Shot of Terrence Malick’s new movie, Tree of Life:

Cinematically, [Stan Brakhage’s Yggdrasill:  Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind is] one of Tree of Life’s closest arboreal cousins, a kind of film best described as devotional: one that gives us a direct experience of the world, or as Nathaniel Dorsky writes, “an image that is in itself a manifested act of seeing.”

Continue Reading →

Failure to Deliver: Predictions that did not predict and a case-closing report that did not close the case

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Part of The Revealer’s series on the John Jay report, The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010.

by Elizabeth Castelli

Last week, two things did not happen.  The Rapture did not take place on May 21, 2011, despite the fervent prognostications of a retired engineer-turned-Christian broadcaster and biblical numerologist.  Meanwhile, the sex abuse scandal that has mired the Catholic Church in litigation and shame for nearly three decades was not resolved nor even really explained, despite the earnest efforts of the number-crunching social scientists at the John Jay College for Criminal Justice, City University of New York.  The coincidence of these two non-happenings was more than a matter of the calendar.

For one thing, both efforts emerged out of a belief that interpreting numbers produces a useable narrative that has an explanatory power.  Under the logic of this belief, the truth is but a matter of simple ciphering—whether Rapture predictions predicated on a series of simple arithmetic calculations or the purported causes of the abuse scandal in the Catholic church carefully measured, calculated, and charted with a soul-numbing statistical precision.  For another, both non-events strove to package up unruly temporality with certainty and finality. In the case of Judgment Day-proclaiming Harold Camping and his Family Radio broadcasts, the focus was on the future, while the John Jay College researchers proclaimed the sexual abuse of minors by priests “a historical problem,” a thing of the past. Continue Reading →