Not yet ordinary time, in several senses.  But I hope you find something sacramental in your day.

Some thoughts about religion pieces in the news recently:

Anyone who wants to talk about the possibility of a "rise of the religious left" has to pay attention to reality.  It's the crucial thing that separates the left and the right these days, so I don't want people on the left to lose it.  This academic piece usefully gathers the data to show that there is no rise, and if anything things are moving in just the opposite direction.  

Religious nationalism in India: A sobering account of India under Modi, which sounds worse than America under Trump.

On Saudi Arabia's impact on Indonesia, but pointing to how, over the past 50 years, Saudi money—Wahhabi money—has had a deeply distortive and disastrous effect on Islamic institutions and movements, and through them on Muslim-majority states, on the global umma of Islam, and on the world as a whole.  It got going in the 70s with the oil crisis, but then really went into overdrive after the Iranian Revolution was taken over by Khomeini in ’79.  (It’s ironic that Said’s Orientalism appeared just as this was getting going, a fact that has meant—in part—that this reactionary movement always could cynically appeal to postcolonial arguments to defend itself.  But the Wahhabi money is actually only the latest version of colonialism, in fact.)  In fact, this is one of the two most powerful facts in the history of religion in the globe over the past half-century, along with the reactionary power of white evangelical Christianity (often affecting non-American Protestantism, and even infecting Roman Catholicism) over the same period.  There’s an amazing book to be written about how these two movements of putative “conservatives” have caused immeasurable harm to the religious legacies of their traditions, and the religious and political realities of our present.   

The self-proclaimed “Museum of the Bible” (actually set up by the owners of Hobby Lobby) is a corrupt place, engaged in corrupt practices, and its theological convictions—centered around the autonomous talismanic power of “the Bible”, though they don’t realize that this approach to evangelization (their real aim) is rather straightforwardly a nineteenth century invention—are deeply flawed.  They are apparently engaged in a large PR campaign now, to try to scrub something of the spattered feces that has attached itself to their reputation because of their wild antics.  I hope it doesn’t work.   

(Interestingly, the forgeries have provoked one scholar of ancient texts to suggest that there must be a scholar in the field doing these forgeries.  In other words, the call is coming from inside the house of ancient literature.)

Jeff Guhin has a nice piece on monasticism, babies, Agamben, the ambivalences of "bare life," the complicated privileges of material security in quarantine, and the possibility of blessing in the domestic ordinary: "we all have the same capacity for a life much more than bare, wherever we are, and however long we’re there."  Check it out.

Jon Malesic has a good piece on how this might make us re-think some of the patterns we were previously enthralled to:

The pandemic has brought to light many failings of our society and values, among them the religious devotion to work: the very American notion that only through labor do our lives have meaning. Thus we have politicians arguing that the holy economy must not be forsaken even at a time like this—that some humans may need to make the ultimate sacrifice so that we all may continue working, generating and spending the money necessary to nourish the insatiable beast of American capitalism. “My message is that let’s get back to work,” Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, said on Fox News last week. “Let’s get back to living. Let’s be smart about it, and those of us who are 70-plus, we’ll take care of ourselves, but don’t sacrifice the country.

Comments like these lay bare an axiom of our culture: You exist, first of all, to work. The coronavirus crisis is simultaneously reinforcing that axiom and undermining it.

Koyaanisqatsi, anyone?