The Mysticism of César Chávez

"While concerning himself with the everyday business of running a union, Chávez routinely fasted. He fasted 'about eight to twelve days every forty-five to sixty days . . . [and] every day between midnight and noon the following day.' ... For the popular press and many scholars, the extended fasts were assumed to be protest fasts: hunger strikes to call attention to a specific injustice, but Chávez consistently and categorically stated otherwise. ... The design of his fast followed a classical mystic model for preparing for a spiritual encounter with God. Chávez felt called by God to fast. ... In time, he began to receive spiritual gifts and a wholly new perspective. He claims to have developed extrasensory hearing capabilities. Chávez stated: 'About the third or fourth day ... my mind clears, it is open to every thing. After a long conversation, for example, I could repeat word for word what had been said.' ... Most importantly for this study, he received a new and higher vision of the world through these experiences by which to make decisions about his life and union. ... 'There haven't been in the last four or five years any major decisions that I didn't make while I was fasting. ... I doubt if you can make mistakes when you are fasting. I really seriously doubt it because you are able to look at things in a very special way. You are ready to look at them when you are in a different mental and physical plane.'"

Stephen R. Lloyd-Moffett, "The Mysticism and Social Action of César Chávez," in Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States, eds. Gastón Espinosa, Virgilio Elizondo, and Jesse Miranda (Oxford University Press, 2005), 38-40.

Young Adults Are Leaving Christianity Because They Perceive It as Anti-Gay

"When asked by The Barna Group what words or phrases best describe Christianity, the top response among Americans ages 16-29 was 'antihomosexual.' For a staggering 91 percent of non-Christians, this was the first word that came to their mind when asked about the Christian faith. The same was true for 80 percent of young churchgoers. ... In the book that documents these findings, titled unChristian, David Kinnaman writes: 'The gay issue has become the "big one", the negative image most likely to be intertwined with Christianity's reputation.' ... Later research, documented in Kinnaman's You Lost Me, reveals that one of the top reasons 59 percent of young adults with a Christian background have left the church is because they perceive the church to be too exclusive, particularly regarding their LGBT friends. Eight million twenty-somethings have left the church, and this is one reason why."

Rachel Held Evans, "How to Win a Culture War and Lose a Generation," RachelHeldEvans.com, May 9, 2012.

The Real Position of Japan towards Christianity

“‘The [1893 World’s Parliament of Religions] was an aggressively Christian event . . . governed by a set of rules for controlling discourse so permeated with Christian presuppositions that they effectively reduced all other religions to inadequate attempts to express the Christian revelation.’

“. . . [A disruption] was caused by a Japanese Buddhist delegate, Hirai Kinzo. … [One of the organizers, John Barrows,] initially disallowed Hirai’s address as too provocative for the Chicago assembly and urged him to present a more conventional essay on religious unity. So when Hirai made his way to the dais clutching his earlier inflammatory paper, Barrows confronted him center stage and tried to stop him from proceeding. A furious Hirai verbally exploded within earshot of the audience: ‘Why do you try to prevent me from speaking? By what rights do you violate my freedom of speech? What authority do you claim to interfere with the speeches of members of this Parliament?’ Barrows recoiled, and the Japanese representative proceeded with his remarked titled ‘The Real Position of Japan towards Christianity,’ a tirade against the ‘abusive, high-handed, self-righteous, bigoted, and racist attitudes of the Christian missionaries in Japan as well as the political inequities perpetrated upon the nation of Japan by the so-called Christian nations.’ The largely Western audience erupted with applause. … Barrows and his committee were hoping to avoid such embarrassing moments when American Protestantism, which they believed was the ultimate culmination of all world religions, was exhibited in anything but the best light. The Protestant-minded committee dreaded public antagonists like Hirai.”

Reid L. Neilson, “Mormonism’s Blacksmith Orator: B. H. Roberts at the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions,” Mormon Historical Studies 12, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 54, 68.

Harold B. Lee on BYU Faculty Members Without Testimonies of the Gospel

From the diary of President Ernest Wilkinson of BYU, April 23, 1959:

"A few weeks previous Kent Fielding of our campus had admitted ... that he did not have a testimony of the Gospel. In answer to the question of why he had become a member of our faculty when he had no testimony of the Gospel, he replied that while he was interrogated by [LDS Apostle] Harold B. Lee at the time of his appointment [to the history faculty in 1952], he was never asked about whether he had a testimony of the Gospel. I had told Brother Lee about this at the time, and Brother Lee, whose main weakness as far as I can see is that he cannot accept criticism, had interpreted it as serious criticism on my part of him. So in this meeting, alluding to this situation, he said he had been disappointed that I had not gotten rid of about a third of the faculty who did not have a testimony of the Gospel. I told him that I thought his estimate was altogether too high. His response was that he thought I must be awfully naive if I did not know the large number of our faculty who did not have a testimony."

Cited in Gary James Bergera, “The Monitoring of BYU Faculty Tithing Payments, 1957-1963,” Sunstone 164 (October 2011): 35.

Stand Your Ground: America's Proud New Tolerance for Killing

“Some of America’s culture of violence is rooted in England. Robert Shoemaker has observed of England’s traditions of male honor before 1800 that ‘violence for men was part of accepted codes of masculine behavior, and offered them a means of affirming gender identity, and gentlemen a means of confirming their superior social position.’ Nevertheless, Shoemaker’s statistical analysis shows that urban Englishmen of all classes were becoming less violent during the decades before 1800. Part of the reason for this decline of violence was the growing success of English common law’s ‘duty to retreat.’ … Beginning with an 1806 decision by a Massachusetts court, gradually the United States ‘as a whole repudiated the English common-law tradition in favor of the American theme of no duty to retreat: that one was legally justified in standing one’s ground to kill in self-defense.’ This shift resulted in America’s proud new tolerance for killing in situations where it might have been avoided by obeying a legal duty to retreat.’”

D. Michael Quinn, “The Culture of Violence in Joseph Smith’s Mormonism,” Sunstone 164 (October 2011): 16.

"Spirit Money" and "the Calculation of Karma" in Ancient China

“[In] the classical exposition of karmic theory ... rebirth was not seen to be the result of weighing the deeds of the past life in a balance and moving up or down in the six realms, depending on the way the scales tipped. Rather, each complete deed from any past life was a potential cause of an entire lifetime, and a variety of factors, including one’s state of mind at death, determined which particular deed would fructify as the next lifetime. But such fine points seem to have been of little interest in most Buddhist societies, where one finds an enduring interest in the calculation of karma. This is nowhere more true than in China, where hell was transformed into an infernal bureaucracy, where the minions of the Lord of Death consulted ledgers of the deeds of the damned. ... [As a result,] an entire genre of ledgers of merit and demerit was spawned. ... These works list hundreds of meritortious and demeritorious deeds, assigning a certain number of positive and negative points to each. Readers were encouraged to pause before sleep each night to take account of the past day’s activities, recording good deeds (and their respective merit) in one column and bad deeds (and their respective demerit) in another” (195-96).

“Mortuary rites in China often involved the use of so-called ‘spirit money,’ bank notes in different denominations, as well as silver and gold ingots (made of paper) that would be burned during the ceremony and thus transported to those awaiting the judgment of where they would be reborn next, who could then use it to make the gifts to the various infernal bureaucrats” (177).

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to Its History and Teachings (San Francisco, Ca.: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 177, 195-96.

The Buddhist Order of Nuns

"Perhaps the most important text regarding women [in Buddhism] is the story of the foundation of the order of nuns. In the account, the Buddha's aunt and stepmother, Mahaprajapati, approached the Buddha and requested that women be allowed to go forth from the worldly life and enter the order. When the Buddha refused, Mahaprajapati and a number of other women shaved their heads, put on monks' robes, and followed the Buddha and his monks on their travels, their bare feet bloodied on the path. The Buddha had ruled that monks must receive the permission of their parents to go forth from the household life ... but not the permission of their wives. The women who followed the widow Mahaprajapati were the wives of men who had become monks. Feeling pity for them, [a male disciple named] Ananda approached the Buddha and requested that the women be allowed to enter the order. The Buddha refused. Ananda then asked whether women are capable of following the path to enlightenment, and the Buddha conceded that they are. Ananda persisted, however, and after his third request, the Buddha relented, but only after prescribing a set of eight rules for nuns that establish their inferiority to monks. ... The account closes with the Buddha predicting, with a certain resentment, that his admission of women to the order will drastically curtail the length of time that his teaching will remain in the world before it disappears completely."

Donald S. Lopez, Jr., The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to Its History and Teachings (San Francisco, Ca.: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 158-59.