Religion Dispatches
…e role of the religious right within it will commence. If the McCain/Palin ticket goes down to defeat, the blame game will predominate—at least at first. Then the questioning will begin: Did the nomination of the Alaska governor help or hurt the ticket? Did playing solely to the base—religious conservatives in particular—limited the ticket’s appeal? Does the Party have to become more mainstream, more inclusive, and more tolerant? Is Palin to be th…
Read More…click! This is why war-, gossip-, and hate-mongers love words like “antisemitism” and “racism”: because they allege something so horrible that, like a traffic accident or Qaddafi video, you just have to look. No surprise, then, that a Jewish far-right organization named “Emergency Committee for Israel” has produced a cheap YouTube video showing a couple of crazy people at Occupy Wall Street shouting antisemitic slogans. For good measure, they’ve t…
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…nsive full-page Sunday New York Times ad, that triggered my flat-out recognition: the 94-year-old daddy of all televangelists is laying his bony patriarchal hands upon a fellow preacher who shares his hawk-like profile, and that man is not Franklin Graham. Romney wants us to turn away from the false gospel of an impostor, a usurper, a false messiah, who happens to be the sitting president. Pretty much every Romney speech tells the story of how thi…
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…experience for me.” A friend called me a couple of weeks ago with an extra ticket to see U2 ’s Joshua Tree tour. I remembered liking some of their songs on the radio, and knowing that everything sounds better at a live concert, I happily accepted. Having not yet been lured into the cult of Bono’s personality, all I knew was the legend that preceded him—international poverty relief icon, (aging) Gen-X sex symbol, and all-around good guy. As the ope…
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…e of a brick. But those aren’t the only differences between Pope John Paul II’s historic 1979 visit and Pope Francis’ virgin trip to the US this week. Pope Francis will find a church that is markedly different in a number of significant ways; so different, in fact, that it calls into question whether we can still refer to the Catholic Church in the US. When JPII made his first visit US, he found a church that was in transition but largely intact….
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…ategy was to hopefully attract what editor Brian McGrory described as “big-ticket, Catholic-based advertisers.” But those advertisers did not materialize. And while the site attracted a good-sized readership, without ad clicks it wasn’t generating cash for the Globe, which pulled the plug and gave Allen control of the site, while laying off O’Loughlin and Eagan in the process (editor Theresa Hanafin was reassigned to another desk at the Globe). Al…
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No other end-of-year list can hope to offer such profound juxtapositions: a groundbreaking female Mennonite pastor alongside an “immortalist”; the transcendent wisdom of a civil rights leader alongside one of the most hate-filled religious figures in contemporary memory. But here it is, a connect-the-dots portrait of a powerfully complicated American religious landscape, circa 2014. Vincent Gordon Harding Historian and theologian Vincent Gordon H…
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…sexual orientation and gender identity. HazteOir, a Spanish group that mobilizes socially conservative activists and sponsored the recent anti-transgender bus tour, was targeted by hackers who downloaded and distributed thousands of internal documents. Also reportedly targeted were affiliated and allied groups, including CitizenGo. United Nations: Activists document C-Fam’s anti-LGBT record When advocates for LGBT human rights complained about th…
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…omething-year-old Deadhead guys hit on my teenage friends by offering them tickets to shows. Deadheads were anathema to my chosen subculture of socially conscious punks. East Bay punks were aggro and in your face about social justice, feminism, human rights; Deadheads, in our eyes, were too stoned and obsessed with their god Jerry to care. Sometimes, I’d be out in Berkeley at night, coming out of a punk show in some basement or garage, and I’d hea…
Read More…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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