Religion Dispatches
…ccurred 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 t…
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…ment of 50,000, as if the faithful at church. The devotion was audible, as tickets were distributed to friends of the Cuban government and not through a public sale. Here the religious nature of the Cuban sporting event is acknowledged only to be dismissed as inauthentic. The patriotic, quasi-religious crooning is suspicious because of its apparent production by the Cuban government, which distributed tickets to friends. Morosi recognizes religiou…
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…the flag that wants them destroyed They saw their names listed in the telephone directory of destruction They were trained to turn the other cheek by newspapers that misspelled, mispronounced and misunderstood their names and celebrated when death came and stole their final laundry ticket” -excerpt from “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri Then the lights went out and the stage lit up, and 60,000 white people finally started paying attention….
Read More…tened to boycott IKEA, after it provided Family Card holders with discount tickets to his Christian magic show, ‘Vision’. In a statement, the chain said it would not be cutting ties with the pastor. IKEA said: “Dear IKEA fans, thanks for your patience while we took time to come to an informed decision on an issue that has raised sensitivities in our community. “After listening to the questions raised, we decided to do a thorough review. We spoke d…
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…self-interrogation boiled, my hand extended to the right. I reached for my phone, but I found nothing. At first I laughed at my instinct, my muscle memory. The phone, with its glowing screen, gave me solace and control. But I was tied to my cushion for another hour, and in this ashram for another day, so email would have to wait. I panicked. My heart raced. Would my editor be asking for me? Would a reply from that politician’s secretary sit unansw…
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…pause. “She says to come on up, she’ll meet with you now. It wouldn’t be fair to cancel since you’re already here.” Fair? As I was to learn, this was true Bedi behavior. I had, quite frankly, expected a prima donna, given her stature. This is someone who had issue a parking ticket to India’s Prime Minister some time during a career that spanned police work, book writing, UN advising, tennis championships, and the Magsaysay Award (a.k.a. Asia’s No…
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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…
Read More…t case, Parker v. Levy, he explained, which in turn guided the creation of Air Force Instruction 1-1, Paragraph 2.12: Leaders at all levels…. must ensure their words and actions cannot reasonably be construed to be officially endorsing or disproving of, or extending preferential treatment for any faith, belief, or absence of belief. [emphasis added] In contrast, the JAG opinion stated: [A] commander may: briefly thank a Supreme Being (either gener…
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…tual community,” linking alienated elements of the Muslim diaspora through cheap communications technology and easy air travel. Islamist military tactics (Web sites as command centers, commercial airplanes as weapons) developed not simply from Hollywood movies, as was so often claimed following the 2001 attacks, but from the experience that constitutes the Muslim sacred community. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is therefore at least partly right in insist…
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…bodies of men, and more recently women too. But even with increases in the numbers of women in the military and changes in recent policies about gays serving our country, the institution itself is deeply rooted in a masculine, heterosexist institutional culture that values physical strength, glorifies the violence of warfare, and demands the simultaneous obedience of soldiers to commanders and the suppression of individual identity in the service…
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