Religion Dispatches
…to me it would be a very easy to make hajj from there. I bought an airline ticket and was in contact with the family of one of my graduate school friends. They would pick me up from the airport and host me during my stay and the days of ritual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and was denied because (as an American) I needed proof that I was Muslim. How do I prove I have been a practicing Muslim for a decade? I went to the famou…
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…iscal policy. Nietzsche, though, would have regarded this as eminently predictable. According to the logic of Nietzsche’s prehistory, Europe (and particularly Germany, which has underwritten the lion’s share of the Greek bailouts) is owed, in lieu of money, the pleasure of inflicting pain. This pain, besides functioning as recompense, will tend to inculcate Greece with the memory that it lacks. Looking at his country’s legal history, Nietzsche rem…
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…she wasn’t saying Jews should return to Germany and Poland circa 1939, but Germany and Poland, 2010. And Germany and Poland in 2010 are quite different than in 1939. In fact, Germany has one of the largest Israeli diasporas in the world, only exceeded by the United States. Israel has better relations with Germany than any other country in the EU, while ultra-Orthodox Jews have been returning to Poland and Hungary and purchasing property once owned…
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…ice minister had suggested that homosexual conduct should be criminalized. Germany: Why does Germany lag its European neighbors on equality? Alexander Görlach, a visiting scholar at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, published an op ed in the New York Times entitled “Germany’s Retrograde Record on Gay Rights.” Görlach identifies Chancellor Angela Merkel and the Christian Democratic Union party as the reason Germany does not rec…
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…ge equality” in the country. New Zealand: Government apologizes to men convicted under old sodomy law The national government formally apologized to about 1000 men who were convicted for violating a legal ban on homosexual activity between 1961 and 1986. Legislation has also been introduced to expunge the convictions. Puerto Rico: Governor creates LGBT advisory board Gov. Ricardo Rossello announced the creation of an advisory board to promote and…
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…the table during meals. And during yoga on the first night, our yogi took pictures with her phone as we attempted the warrior pose. Was I back in Los Angeles? Why wasn’t this different? The staff—all devotees of the Ananda movement, a Hindu spiritual fellowship founded in northern California during the late 60s—only reinforced feelings of familiarity. There was Jemal, the dreadlocked, Yale-educated monk who waxed philosophic about the “sublime” be…
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…good move. When I got to the lobby another something told me to dig out my phone and check it for messages. Sure enough, I had one from an unfamiliar number. A woman’s voice said Bedi was still sleeping, exhausted from the previous day’s overseas flight, and needed to reschedule our interview for that afternoon. I called the number back, convinced the opportunity was lost. “I’m here at the hotel now, but I’m booked solid this afternoon—” “Hold on,…
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…y from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at reduced price; cheap wares for cheap faith. It would be an error, however, to fully dismiss pop culture angels. Despite the fact that representations of angels in film and television, comics and music, paperback novels and posters, are filtered through market concerns, such pop culture can still speak to human meaning—and because of that they merit our attention. Besides, the bulk of art…
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…as in recent years descended into reactionary fear-mongering—claiming that Germany was under a new “dictatorship,” and that leftist indoctrination from the Green party was sweeping the country against the will of its people, who, according to the author, are under “siege.” Adrian Daub, a professor of literature at Stanford University, has lived in the U.S. for 27 years now. Visiting Germany this summer, he was struck by the shift he saw in German…
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…. But robots aren’t just taking jobs. Last Monday, at a Volkwagen plant in Germany, one robot killed an employee. The machine in question—a sophisticated automotive assembly line robot—normally operates within a circumscribed area, grabbing parts and manipulating them according to a predetermined process. As a team of workers was setting it up, however, the robot grabbed one of them—a 22-year-old man—and crushed him against a metal plate. Volkswag…
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