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Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

By Eboo Patel

…on the tension caused when Orthodox Jewish men request same-sex seating on airlines for religious reasons generated over 3,000 reader responses. The scenario as described in the story generally unfolds something like this: the individual reaches his assigned seat and finds that the seat next to him is occupied by a woman. He shifts uncomfortably in the aisle until the flight attendant or an alert passenger recognizes what’s going on and asks the w…

Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…an now be searched, hyperlinked, downloaded, spliced, copied, truncated, emailed, text-messaged, recited with video accompaniment, chanted on iPod, and piped from watches into earplugs—they are available in as many digital forms as there are devices to access them. Hopeful worshippers are even constructing their own online religious “texts” in the form of digitized prayers, video accompaniment to existing religious texts, and the recording and sha…

Death Without Religion

By Gordon Haber

…eaning of mortality itself. So (to paraphrase Saul Bellow) the question remains: What do we do about death? How do we live with the fact of our mortality? Many (obviously) look to religion for answers. Not me. Even if I consider myself somewhat religious, I have a hard time accepting the life-after-death claims of my own religion, Judaism. The dilemma is not uncommon: Although 80-90% of Americans believe in God, some 25-50% do not believe in life…

How to Die in America: A Conversation with Ann Neumann

By Ellie Faustino

…messy realness, but also prepare for it. We talked with Neumann recently via email. RD: Why is it important for us to have a conversation about death right now? Ann Neumann: There are a few reasons why we are necessarily discussing death now. For several generations, death has been institutionalized, hidden behind curtains and managed by professionals. So those of us who are dying or caring for the dying have no idea what’s coming. We’ve grown ac…

Death With Dignity: Combatting Religious Opposition to Physician-Assisted Suicide

By Krista Kapralos

…urch events every summer. “They lived and breathed it,” Nancy Niedzielski said. When Randy Niedzielski was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2000, he and his wife joined a support group in the Seattle area, where they lived. They watched others deteriorate. “We knew it would be a slow, painful death,” Nancy Niedzielski said. In 1997, Oregon voters approved the Death with Dignity Act, which allows terminally ill people to ask their doctors for a presc…

High Holidays Watch: Seth Rogen’s Latest Highlights the ‘American Pickle’ of Living with Death

By Shaul Magid

…at-grandson Ben Greenbaum, a web and app designer who lives in hipster Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Herschel gets pickled in Brooklyn in 1919 and wakes in 2019, where he meets his great-grandson. Herschel is a ditch digger in the Pale of Settlement before he comes to America because Cossacks burn down his village. He’s so destitute he can’t even afford a durable shovel. His life has no future, no prospects, no purpose. He wants two things only: to marr…

Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

By Matt Hamilton

…ake it,” I inwardly begged. As a journalist, I live and die by my phone, email and Twitter. I call sources, pursue leads, check the news, and schedule interviews. I don’t know how not to do this. Yet here I was at the Ananda Ashram in rural India, expecting (and craving) swift condemnation by the monks and nuns at the sight of an iPhone. I was on a university-sponsored trip to the subcontinent with other journalists, all of us covering politics an…

Religious Affiliation, ‘Mankind’: India’s Anti-Corruption Activist Leads Second Freedom Struggle

By April L. Bogle

Indian activists are not household names in America—unless you count Gandhi. But former “top cop” Kiran Bedi is a huge figure in her own country, and has lent her considerable status to the grassroots India Against Corruption campaign as the movement evolves. What some are calling India’s Arab Spring has been more like a summer of discontent, complete with demonstrations and arrests, all in support of this epic fight against government corruption…

Whatever COVID-19 Brings, This Chaplain Wants You to Remember That the Death Rate is Ultimately 100%

By J. Dana Trent

…-graduate residency year in hospital clinical pastoral education (aka chaplaincy) with an unintended specialization in end-of-life care. I stumbled into death, dying, and grief; several months later, my supervisor wrote that I’d taken to end-of-life care chaplaincy “as a morning glory takes to sunlight.” Caring for people in crisis—which even a peaceful, predicted death can be—is comfortable for me. During those twelve months, I had the honor of s…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

Ellie Burrows and Lodro Rinzler had their big idea over a cup of tea. Certain details change with the telling (was it a nail salon or a hair salon?), but here’s the official version: during a teatime conversation, Burrows asked Rinzler “why there wasn’t a modern, non-religious, drop-in studio where she could meditate in the same way she could drop into a salon and get her hair done.” Rinzler, it turned out, had been thinking along the same lines….