new age spiritualities

What ought we do about millennial thinking in our day? If the combined 1300 pages of these two books have taught me anything, it’s that we can’t make it just go away. There is something fascinating, and perverse, in the human psyche that seems to yearn for this world to be other than how it is, even if that means destroying it.

Kate Bornstein’s new book recounts the years before Scientology was considered a religion, when it gave her all the answers on gender, loss, and addiction she needed not to hear. Sounds just like… bad religion.

Roman Polanski’s 1968 horror flick—among others in the ’60s and ’70s—may provide some surprising insights into the GOP’s “War on Women.”

Total surrender to heteronomous ethics is unhealthy, period. It may be prescribed by some, but it is also what leads to fundamentalism and religious violence. Gay people know this firsthand: to love oneself as a religious queer person requires interposing one’s own experience between oneself and the text. The text in its traditional reading cannot be correct, because it is incompatible with a notion of a loving God. But that truth is only known by allowing experience, conscience, and discernment to speak.

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.

I’m not an unbeliever. No way. My theology is fuzzy, a bit of a smorgasbord—Emerson and Tolstoy and Jesus and Augustine. I would be happily worshipping with Quakers if I could find any; the “inner light” makes so much sense to me. The truth is, I respect faith. I love the sacrificial love God inspires in human beings. I worship the Creator of an amazingly beautiful, diverse, and exciting planet. It’s obvious the hand of God is everywhere and always has been. Is that enough common ground for peace between us? Don’t answer. I’m afraid it’s not.

A new book reveals the historical roots and conservative uses of the positive thinking movement, showing how it encourages victim-blaming, political complacency, and a culture-wide flight from realism.

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.

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…

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.