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AR 21:23 - Is Osteen also among "the court poets of capitalism?"
In this issue:
DEATH - from stories of miraculous recovery - to cultures that keep a corpse at home with the family ... sometimes for years
ISLAM - the Shia origins of Islamic politics
WORD-FAITH MOVEMENT - "why religious history is the mainstream of American history," a portent of consequences?
Apologia Report 21:23 (1,296)
June 22, 2016
DEATH
The April 2016 issue of National Geographic included "The Science of Death: Coming Back from the Beyond" and features two items. The first is "The Crossing" by Robin Marantz Henig (pp30-52) which asks: "Is death an event or more of a progression? Science and human experience offer answers." Henig begins with near-death experience, calling it "the ragged border between life and death.... This borderland is becoming increasingly populated, as scientists explore how our existence is not a toggle - 'on' for alive, 'off' for dead - but a dimmer switch that can move through various shades between white and black. In the gray zone, death isn't necessarily permanent, life can be hard to define, and some people cross over that great divide and return - sometimes describing in detail what they saw on the other side." (Who catalogs their contradictions? - RP)
"Death is 'a process, not a moment,' writes critical-care physician Sam Parnia in his book Erasing Death [1]." Henig reports that Parnia works in New York, where he "spreads the gospel of sustained resuscitation" in which "some patients can be brought back from the dead after hours without a heartbeat, often with no long-term consequences."
Stories follow. An exceptional one is about toddler Gardell Martin, who fell into an icy stream to drown - not being found for 90 minutes. "'He had no signs of life whatsoever,' recalls Richard Lambert, director of pediatric sedation service and a member of the pediatric critical-care team" that cared for Gardell when he was rushed to the hospital. "Even worse, the boy had a shockingly low blood pH, a sign of imminent organ failure." Gardell was "without pulse or breath for more than an hour and a half." The actual duration of his "death" was calculated at 101 minutes. He survived without side effects.
A second feature, Amanda Bennett's "Where Death Doesn't Mean Goodbye" (pp53-69), is as bizarre as Gardell's story is amazing. Bennett reports that "In a remote corner of Indonesia, the departed - and their corpses - remain part of the family." In Toraja, on the island of Sulawesi, there is an "old custom of never leaving a dead person alone." For these people, "death is just one step in a long, gradually unfolding process. Late loved ones are tended at home for weeks, months, or even years after death. [The eventual] funerals are often delayed as long as necessary to gather far-flung relatives. The grandest funeral ceremonies are week-long [very expensive] events drawing Toragans home in a vast reverse diaspora from wherever in the world they may be. ...
"Torajan death practices ... date back at least as far as the ninth century A.D. ...
"Thanks to Dutch missionaries, it's a Christian enclave, made up mostly of Protestants but also Roman Catholics, in a majority-Muslim country. Christianity has tried more or less successfully to partner with traditional practices: Nearly every step of a Toragan death is greeted with prayers, readings from Matthew or John, and a recitation of the Lord's Prayer. ...
"Nearly half a million Torajans live in the highlands of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The vast majority, at least 90 percent, are Christians, but they remain influenced by their traditional religion, Aluk To Dolo, or Way of the Ancestors."
As for their funerals, a good deal of the expense encountered is due to the sacrifice of buffalo - said to "go with the [deceased] to the next world and make [them] rich.
"A grand Torajan funeral is measured in the number and quality of buffalo, which serve as a form of currency [with] carefully choreographed rituals separating the dead gradually from life. ...
"Funerals glue Torajans tightly, one family to the next, one village to the next. Funerals consume savings as people outdo each other in gifts of animals, creating multigenerational obligations and conspicuous consumption."
Included are some of the nastiest photos ever seen in NG, a glossy magazine not known for holding back on reality. [4]
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ISLAM
The Emergence of Modern Shi'ism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran, by Zachery Heern [2] -- writing for Religioscope (Feb 13 '16), Olivier Moos reviews this "little known story of the birth of the Shia neo-Usuli movement and its evolution from the late 18th century until its culmination into contemporary Shi'ism. ...
"Since the 19th century within the Shia world, Usulism has been the dominating school of thought and has reached a prominent position both in modern Iran and southern Iraq. One of the primary legacies of neo-Usulism has been the empowerment of a clerical class, whose transnational network of charities, schools and wealthy businesses were to become the organizational and ideological backbone of Ayatollah Khomeini's rise to power in the early 1980s. Heir to the reformist impulse of the neo-Usuli movement, the new political system built in Iran by clerics was a unique - even modern - innovation in Islamic history. ...
"An engaging last chapter tackles the questions of contextual distinctions and commonalities between neo-Sufism, neo-Usulism and neo-Hanbalism. ... They aimed at rejuvenating their respective traditions, and in so doing, invariably narrowed the scope of what is considered Islamic orthodoxy. Eventually, these movements would become associated with the organizations today commonly deemed 'Islamist' or 'political Islam.'
"A challenging and thought-provoking read." <www.goo.gl/02ALau>
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WORD-FAITH MOVEMENT
James Livingston, who teaches history at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, titles his review "The Gospel of Wealth: Looking at religion's effect on American capitalism." The book itself is The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream, by Chris Lehmann [3], a co-editor of Bookforum <bookforum.com>. "Lehmann demonstrates ... that Protestantism at its extreme, out there on the European frontier called America, was a way of re-enchanting the world, not draining it of transcendent meanings - and it still is, in the evangelical or Pentecostal forms of contemporary megachurches, where Joel Osteen, the 'prophet of the new millennial prosperity gospel,' presides over an empire of God-blessed striving and self-help.
"Lehmann’s point is not that the ruthless rationality of the market never quite overruled magical thinking. It’s that the mysteries of the market itself have always solicited such thinking, and always will. ...
"[T]he key insight of Lehmann’s book is that the Puritans and their theological heirs (including the Mormons) completed the logic of the New Testament by treating God as a man - by honoring the worldly economic activities of men on earth, in this life, not hoping for the exemptions from work that would come later, in the next life.
"Lehmann shows that a specifically Protestant, vaguely gnostic materialism has always animated American life, saturating the lowly world of objects with the sanctity of higher, heavenly purpose, even unto our time. His book is a tour de force that illustrates the continuities of American cultural and economic history. ...
"Lehmann claims that the Puritans sanctified the market as such. They didn’t. Instead, they feared it, and went to great lengths to contain it. In their view, money, property and wealth were the means to the end of a self-determining personality who could choose God’s path of his own free will - they weren’t ends in themselves. ... They were the first articulate anticapitalists.
"On the other hand, Lehmann suggests ... that the Puritans were the prophets of the self-made man, the tricky Yankee trader unbound by custom, family, tradition or community. They weren’t. John Winthrop, among others, preached a 'yoak [sic] of government, both sacred and civil' to contain the 'wild beast' that would be loosed by the embrace of every individual’s 'natural liberty.' ...
"Sometimes The Money Cult reads like something straight out of the 1920s [with] Puritanism a metaphor for everything distasteful about American culture. More often, it sounds refreshingly new. For Chris Lehmann has shown us why religious history is the mainstream of American history - and how Protestant theologians became the court poets of capitalism." New York Times Sunday Book Review, Jun 19 '16, p19. <www.goo.gl/NSX7Km>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death, by Sam Parnia and Josh Young (HarperOne, 2013, hardcover, 352 pages) <www.goo.gl/H8lNDb>
2 - The Emergence of Modern Shi'ism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran, by Zachery Heern (Oneworld, 2015, paperback, 240 pages) <www.goo.gl/mR0WjZ>
3 - The Money Cult: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Unmaking of the American Dream, by Chris Lehmann (Melville, 2016, hardcover, 432 pages) <www.goo.gl/OO3rXY>
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