One of the acute paradoxes afflicting conscious human life is the awareness of death. The paradox reaches crisis when one fully realizes that death cannot be experienced — it occurs outside of experience, and we therefore lack any frame of reference for it.
The intense weirdness of death has of course captivated many great thinkers and [...]
Tags:awareness of death·Claude Lanzmann·death·dying·Ernest Becker·existence·immortality·Jean Baudrillard·mortality·non-existence·Peter Berger·Shoah·Symbolic Exchange and Death·The Denial of Death·The Sacred Canopy
In a curiously titled (“Congregations Gone Wild“) op-ed piece for the New York Times, pastor Jeffrey MacDonald bemoans the pressures that now assail the American clergy. What are these pressures? Entertaining the flock. Selling religion as a commodity for comfortable consumers-parishioners.
Despite the title tease alluding to a sophomoric video series in which college-aged women bare [...]
Tags:clergy burnout·Congregations Gone Wild·entertaining religion·fear based faith·fear based religion·Jeffrey MacDonald·liturgy·marketplace of faith·Peter Berger·puppets·religion as commodity·religious entertainment·sociological theory·soothing religion·The Sacred Canopy
