Religion Dispatches
…ou’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I could find my airline companion and give him this book, to surprise him, too—in a good way. (I would accept Lakers tickets in lieu of apologies, but I think that particular era is done.) This whole book is a result of a profound evolution, and needs to be seen as such. American Muslims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us ou…
Read More…is post about Georgetown Law professor Marty Lederman, who first raised it last year.) In short, contrary to Hobby Lobby’s claims that not offering the coverage would subject it to ruinous fines, the regulation merely imposes a tax. Should a company choose to offer no group health plan at all, it would pay the tax, which, Kagan argued, is less than a cost of a group health plan. What’s more, she argued, even if the company offered higher wages to…
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…; an approach that has nothing to do with the pro-choice movement. Despite last week’s conservative media frenzy, the Mason case is officially personal—it’s “coincidental,” not politically motivated or associated. According to investigator Spottke, the “person of interest” is actually a couple the Masons had a falling out with—former friends who “have the same beliefs and standings as the Masons.” Spottke informed RD that Mason had asked the polic…
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…te segregation and economic favoritism. When I spoke with Rothstein on the phone, he underscored the long-term effects of this last policy. During the 1940s and 1950s, suburban subdivisions were built in St. Louis, and throughout the country, using federal loans stipulating that no homes be sold to African Americans. Priced at about $125,000 in today’s dollars, these were affordable—with a mortgage—to working class families, black or white. Yet bl…
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…t this new role as he and his American Episcopalian guides drove East from Denver to Louisiana, up through South Carolina to Washington DC. ______________________ RD: A number of American human rights experts have said that the killing and forced displacement of the Ngok Dinka people from Abyei in May, and their replacement by the Arab, northern-aligned Misseriya, constitutes “ethnic cleansing.” Is ethnic cleansing part of what is happening in Ka…
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…Laguna Seca. The author and some of her Deadhead friends at a Dead show in Las Vegas in 1993. Photo courtesy of the author. It was through our love of the Dead that we formed a tribe of friends. We were a hodgepodge of Iranian, Korean, American, and Israeli kids bound together by our love of the band and bonded with each other by road trips where all 20 of us would crash in an EZ 8 motel in the middle of Oakland for days when the band was in town….
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…a is a believer in that legacy. But the power of sports to produce heightened emotional states of unity, which scholars call “collective effervescence,” can also give it a shared power with religion to occlude injustice in this world, to bury it in cheap, playful sentiment. Sports, like religion, and like the American Dream, will thus continue to be contested symbolic terrain, where the stakes can prove much more complicated than zero-sum games, a…
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…walked to the Tabernacle on Temple Square to wait in the stand-by line for last-minute tickets. Instead they were met by church spokesperson Ruth Todd, who said, “This is no surprise to you, that we won’t be able to offer you a ticket or a place.” Then, as men and boys strode past them into the Tabernacle where they awaited the opportunity to move to the Conference Center where the session would take place, members of Ordain Women lined up indivi…
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…d customers at restaurants want to get their dish for free, or get a free glass of wine, or a free dessert, because that balances out the input-output equation. So if the customer service agent gives you something, then you feel compensated, then you’re okay, and it’s not such a cognitive puzzle, and also not such a frustration to deal with the amorphous agent of the airline as a whole. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the customer service agent or…
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…our world tours, recorded four albums, and performed 248 sold-out shows in Las Vegas. Today she’s worth more than $60 million. While everyone knows about Spears, few know—and even fewer discuss—the role religion has played in her life. Like Katy Perry, who was once a Contemporary Christian Music artist, Spears has deep roots in white American evangelicalism. Born and raised in the Bible Belt and surrounded by conservative evangelical Protestants,…
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