religion | ZETEO

Spiritualism, Summerland, Slavery in the Afterlife

July 30, 2018 by Emily Sosolik

“The Negro Is the Negro Still” How spiritualism grappled with slavery and race in the Civil War era By Emily Sosolik [In the Summerland] all distinctions between [African Americans] and white spirits cease to exist, they then having become as white, beautiful, refined, and intellectual as these. — Spiritualist Eugene Crowell, “The Spirit World: Its Inhabitants, Nature, and Philosophy”[1] The Civil War era produced extraordinary change in nearly every aspect of American life. From the annexation of Texas in 1845 […]

Categories: Article • Tags: civil war, death, religion, slavery, spirituality, US history, US politics

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Asano_Takeji-No_Series-Snow_at_Iwashimizu_Hachiman_Shrine_Kyoto

Kenko, Kerouac, Snyder, Prayer

June 29, 2018 by William Eaton

A book by an American scholar of Japanese literature briefly discusses one of the anecdotes of The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, a classic which dates back to the fourteenth century. The scholar, Linda Chance, offers the following translation: A priest of the Ninnaji, regretting that he had not paid his respects at Iwashimizu [a Shinto shrine not far from Kyoto] before growing old, took it into his head to do so and set out alone on foot. He prayed at Gokurakuji […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Buddhism, California, denial, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Japan, prayer, religion, tourism, translation

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Sacrificio di Isacco (The Sacrifice of Isaac), 1603. In the collection of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Genesis Interpretation After Auerbach

June 28, 2016 by Martin Green

Twenty-Three Ways (and Counting) of Looking at the Bible By Martin Green Review of Reading Genesis: Beginnings, edited by Beth Kissileff (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2016) Beth Kissileff’s recent anthology Reading Genesis: Beginnings presents twenty-three ways of looking at the first book of the Hebrew Bible. Well, perhaps not twenty-three distinct ways of reading Scripture, but twenty-three authors weigh in, applying tools, many from secular disciplines, to find new meanings in these ancient texts. And these approaches, including game theory, leadership […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Genesis, literary theory, religion, social science, The Bible

Magritte, L'Oasis (The Oasis), 1925-1927

Woolf, Eliot, Global Warming, Christmas

December 23, 2015 by William Eaton

Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries. Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: climate change, global warming, God, Magritte, religion, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf

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Nones Crossfit Spirituality

December 11, 2015 by Walter Cummins

Seeking Spirituality in a Secular World An article in the New York Times about people who enjoyed a religious experience in a gym led me to think about the range of human quests for some sort of spiritual connection, and beyond that what such a spiritual connection might mean. The Times article, “When Some Turn to Church, Others Go to CrossFit” by Mark Oppenheimer, reports on Harvard Divinity School researchers’ attempts to define religiosity in contemporary America. Their project, […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: André Comte-Sponville, atheism, Christianity, God, Hortus deliciarum, religion, Wittgenstein

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Paris, Terrorism, Religion, Justice

November 14, 2015 by William Eaton

The recent documentary about the Black Panthers called attention, among other things, to that group’s ten-point platform, which included such demands as “We Want Decent Housing Fit For The Shelter Of Human Beings” and “We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role In The Present-Day Society.” The Panthers were not a terrorist group; they engaged in demonstrations and political theater that at times included unconcealed weapons. They wanted revolution, but—like many Sixties leftwing groups in the US, […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: capitalism, class warfare, justice, Paris, religion, terrorism, Third World War, working class

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31 October 1517

October 31, 2015 by William Eaton

The same day when little ghosts and goblins haunt the neighborhoods, the Protestant world commemorates Reformation Day. The rest of the world may not celebrate, but it should take note of an event that started a process that shaped the Western world. On 31 October 1517 in the tiny German university town of Wittenberg, population about 2,000, the university beadle attached a printed announcement to a church door. In accordance with university conventions, the announcement, in Latin, the language used by […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: Catholic Church, Christianity, Luther, Reformation, religion

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Testifying (John the Baptist, Flores, MacNeice)

July 31, 2015 by William Eaton

1 A man seen on a Sunday—a very hot and humid Sunday. He’s slight, middle-aged, not quite shabbily dressed. He’s standing under a highway underpass, one of the hundreds if not thousands of highway underpasses in Connecticut. (And may I say, too, that Connecticut is one of the worst states to try to drive through. Suburban sprawl, highway-widening projects. In North Carolina some political figure came up with the horrible idea that highways should keep being built until every North […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: Christianity, God, Jesus, poetry, Quaker meeting, religion, sports

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Factual Mind-Sets, Communing Sensibilities

April 26, 2015 by Ed Mooney

As someone who writes quite a bit about religion from philosophical and literary — not to say, religious — points of view, I was not surprised but piqued by a Sunday opinion piece in the New York Times. Here is T. M. Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist who writes regularly for the Times on religion. Here she reports on “Faith vs. Facts.” A broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: religion, science, The Bible, thinking, Thoreau