This entry was posted on Sunday, March 5th, 2006 at 12:15 AM and is filed under Religion, Philosophy, and the Nature of Truth.

PraiseMoves advertises itself as a Christian alternative to yoga. PraiseMoves has been ridiculed. Yoga (and religion) fusions have been ridiculed.

I offered an explanation as to why I might be interested in PraiseMoves. I never got around to following up on that interest. Why? In many respects, I thought I would dislike it for many of the same reasons that I didn’t like any of the Christian aerobics materials that I found when I went searching for them. In fact, even Christians may find the concept of Christian aerobics laughable. Some Christians even have bad memories of an era in which Christian aerobics was rather popular.

I wasn’t looking for a Christian aerobics that was aerobics with the Christian label slapped on it. And I wasn’t looking for an evangelism lesson with an aerobics label slapped on it. But the latter was all I was finding - now-a-days anyway.

And I thought that might be all I found when I saw PraiseMoves - that it was a piece of evangelism with yoga slapped on it.

The issue I’m finding is that the only people that care to sanitize aerobics from the vain “my physical appearance is so important to me” message are those that want to put their own message in there. Same too with those that would sanitize yoga from it’s references to psychic anatomy (chakras) - they want to replace it all with other messages….

When yoga fusions hit the mainstream press, they are not ridiculing these fusions. Indeed, when “Eastern” ideas hit popular culture, the press seems happy to support them. Centering Prayer appears to have ties to certain Eastern-style contemplative practices, and serious Catholics seem to have issues with Centering prayer. When cast in this light, Eastern practices get seen as tools of Satan against the church’s very foundations: prayer.

When seen in that light, the futility of extracting out the message from the practice becomes more fully realized.

The Hebrew word pictures offered by the folks that make PraiseMoves and their relation to the PraiseMoves Alphabetics(Hebrew letter positions) suggest a possibly more authentic way of having a physical practice that is not rooted in a non-Christian message. However, I suspect that this has been altered substantially via a “Christian” veneer as original Hebrew would not have had “the cross” mean anything special and certainly would have had no reason to have the word for religion be “the door of the cross” as offered in the explanation on that page.

So, what’s next? In a few years (or sooner), expect to find “Christian para para liturgical dance videos” (I’m not joking - I think it will come). In the meantime, only tried and true forms of physical moment as traditionally associated with that spiritual practice are suitable for truly remaining within that practice. So: Hindus, do yoga; Christians, walk labyrinths; Native Americans, go hunt. You all get the idea….

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.