In the News: Satanism, Sacred Music, Shasta Seekers, and more!
A round-up of the week’s religion news. Continue Reading →
Tag: spirituality
In the News: Wicca, Climate Change, Gaza and Much More
A round-up of recent religion and media stories in the news. Continue Reading →
I'm Not Religious, I Just Love Meditation
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.
I’m Not Religious, I Just Love Meditation
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.
Steve Jobs' Religious Ego
Amy Levin: How long is it appropriate to mourn the death of Steve Jobs? Perhaps we should turn to Zen Buddhism, since, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography, it was the so-called religion of Jobs himself. According to Daniel Burke at Religion News Service, “Since his death on Oct. 5, the famously private man’s spiritual side has become an open book.” According to Isaacson’s biography, Jobs left his Lutheran church at age 13, later turning to eastern spirituality, specifically Zen Buddhism. After traveling to India in 1974 to find a guru (unsuccessfully), Jobs found Suzuki disciple Kobun Chino Otagawa in his hometown in California at the Haiku Zen Center. Continue Reading →
Steve Jobs’ Religious Ego
Amy Levin: How long is it appropriate to mourn the death of Steve Jobs? Perhaps we should turn to Zen Buddhism, since, according to Walter Isaacson’s biography, it was the so-called religion of Jobs himself. According to Daniel Burke at Religion News Service, “Since his death on Oct. 5, the famously private man’s spiritual side has become an open book.” According to Isaacson’s biography, Jobs left his Lutheran church at age 13, later turning to eastern spirituality, specifically Zen Buddhism. After traveling to India in 1974 to find a guru (unsuccessfully), Jobs found Suzuki disciple Kobun Chino Otagawa in his hometown in California at the Haiku Zen Center. Continue Reading →
Practice, Theology and Identity at #OWS
Courtney Bender writes at The Scoop:
We could even say that occupiers’ refusal to give uncomplicated answers to the question of whether their motivations are rooted mainly in religious, secular, economic or political identities holds up a useful mirror to the very messy, complicated social and economic morass that they critique. This is another way of saying that sussing out religion in Occupy Wall Street might be easier through attention to the origins and effects of the impulses playing out in groups that identify with the phenomenon. To the ways that they draw upon or resonate with atmospheric connections among religion, capitalism andAmerican identity.
If Wall Street is an “abstraction,” as one astute observer has put it, and the question of “how to occupy an abstraction” is being worked out as we watch, then we should ask how spirituality, one of the greatest American abstractions, is present in this working-out. It is reasonable to expect that occupiers will turn to the largely uncategorized trove of practice, theology and identity that we have often dismissed as the “spiritual”–and which might turn out to have deeper political dimensions than anyone knew.
A 12-Step History? Not so fast.
Amy Levin: When religion in the news bestows a chance to show how complicated history can be, I’ll take it. Rabbi Shais Taub recently published an article in HuffPost Religion on Judaism and addiction recovery, explaining just how spiritually high some steps are in the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program. Taub has some compelling insights into the very spiritually fragile nature of recovering addicts, but what his post arguably lacks is the rich history of 12-step programs in America’s expansive and vivid religious landscape. Continue Reading →
Tripping on Science: The Psychedelic Community Contests Terms
by Peter Bebergal
Despite their common, and mostly fringe area of concern, the psychedelic subculture — whose kaleidoscopic reflection includes Johns Hopkins scientists, transpersonal psychologists, dozens of independent (non-affiliated) researchers, writers, visionary artists, and the users themselves — is often at odds with itself. Above board researchers take pride in their work, adhering to the strict peer review process that all science is subject to. But to some, the work of psychedelics is the work of the spirit, of the non-rational, of connecting ourselves to something that may well not be testable or empirically verifiable. There are also clashes of personality, of ideologies, and of intention. Sometimes it’s simply a disagreement over words, what they mean, and how they should be used.
At the heart over a disagreement of the meaning of words within a very small subculture is another more essential divergence, one that reflects a wider cultural conflict between science and spirituality.
One of the most remarkable developments in the past ten years is the trending toward acceptance in the scientific community of research involving psychedelic drugs after an almost forty year period of disregard. But like other recent fields of research, such as work done with stem cells, DNA, and even evolutionary biology, it finds itself up against the question of spirituality. Continue Reading →
Believing in Prison
On May 1, our sister site, Killing the Buddha, hosted an event in midtown NYC titled, “The Prison-Spirituality Complex.” You can listen to the entire event here. Nathan Schneider, editor at Killing the Buddha, writes at his own site, The Row Boat, “My instinct is that, with religion so centrally a part of the birth of the American prison disaster, religion will somehow have to be part of the solution.” You can read Nathan’s interview with panel participant and author of The Prison and the American Imagination, Caleb Smith, in this month’s issue of Tricycle (subscription only). Continue Reading →